What Happens When the Map Excludes Your Country

Inside a First-Day-of-School PD Where Pattern-First Minds Go Unseen

First day back PD in a windowless room, sat through Hess’ “rigour” with no place for autistic or GLP minds. In my head, Rik, Vyv, Jerzy, and Madness make more sense than the slides. Afternoon’s Zooms promise more of the same.

Back to School …

It’s the first day back—not teaching, not quite yet—but the ceremonial beginning of the year in the district sense. Which means professional development. Which means I’m sat in a big school near mine, a school that has its own zip code of car parks and corridors, where people actually wear blazers unironically and call each other “coach” in the hallway. It’s almost close enough that I could walk here from my school, but far enough that it feels like a different country entirely.

It’s lunchtime now. Everyone else has gone off in clusters to a bistro round the corner—walking distance if you don’t mind weaving through a carpark the size of an Amazon fulfilment centre. I’ve stayed here, in this windowless, humming room, with its vaguely sticky tables and the smell of institutional floor cleaner. I need a minute. Need to write. Need to clear the accumulation of the morning out of my head before it calcifies into the sort of tiredness that’s not about sleep but about erosion.

Because this morning… well. This morning was Hess. The district PD gods have decreed that our theme is “Rigor by Design, Not Chance,” which sounds like something you’d find engraved on a plaque in a business park lobby. I’m sure Karin Hess means something very specific and worthy by it, but here, in the filtered air of this century’s old classroom, it’s mostly meant hours of being talked at about the magic of asking probing questions, aligning everything to Depth of Knowledge matrices, and designing lessons to hit those all-important standards for mathematical practice. And, as ever, autistic people—my students, myself—are nowhere in it. Gestalt language processors are even further from view. No windows. No mirrors. Just wall after wall of someone else’s architecture, with no acknowledgement that other houses exist.

The thing about sitting through this, for me, is that I feel the absence more than the presence. The examples are always of them: the linear processors, the verbal analysts, the ones for whom rigour means showing each step in perfect sequence, annotated using the approved methods. The “productive struggle” they mean is a very particular sort of struggle—the one that comes with decoding and recombining in that analytic way. But for GLPs? For us, it’s a mismatch so total it’s almost comical. The knowing we have—fast, whole, pattern-first—is invisible here. And when it’s invisible, it’s treated as non-existent.

So I’m watching slide after slide about how to get students to “justify their reasoning” and “show evidence of their thinking” and I’m thinking, right, but what about the kid who has the answer because they saw it all in one go, but can’t backtrack through the steps because there were no steps? What about the student whose explanation would be metaphor, or a drawing, or a gesture, or nothing at all—just a quiet “I know” and the correctness to prove it? Those students don’t exist in this model. They’re erased before they even sit down.

Meanwhile, outside the confines of this PD bubble, the city is… not on fire, exactly, but the air feels like it could be. It’s Los Angeles in August. Heat, pressure, politics. There’s the creeping state violence—the ICE raids, the militarisation, the way schools are expected to absorb every social collapse without breaking stride. And here we are, in our neat groups, earnestly workshopping whether the “Which One Doesn’t Belong?” warm-up could better support students’ engagement with SMP 3 or SMP 6. I mean, honestly. FFS!

It’s not that I’m against thinking about pedagogy, or even rigor, in some real sense. But this is busywork dressed as vision. It’s the sort of thing that makes a certain kind of administrator feel safe—look, we’re Doing The Standards—while the actual human needs of our classrooms go untouched. I keep wondering if anyone else in this room feels it: the dissonance between the world outside and the world in here, between the way our students live and the way we’re told to teach them.

I can’t help looping back, recursively, to the absence. The missing windows and mirrors. For neurodivergent students—autistic, GLP, otherwise wired for whole-first knowing—there is no entry point here. No starter gestalt, no hook, no reason to care. Just a task. “Make a box by cutting out squares from each corner of a sheet of paper.” Followed by questions. Followed by more questions. Followed by the directive to justify, to prove, to verbalise. It’s a performance of understanding, not the thing itself. And I’m sat here thinking of all the times I’ve seen students shut down when asked to explain something they already knew, because the knowing was pre-verbal, embodied, intuitive—and trying to force it into an analytic frame was like trying to unbake a cake.

And then, because my mind is slippery when I’m tired, I drift into this sort of half-daydream where the absurdity of it all tips over into sitcom territory. In my head, Rik from The Young Ones is sitting next to me, scribbling rude cartoons in the margins of the handout, muttering about how the DOK chart looks like a blueprint for a prison. Vyv is on the other side, cutting his paper into a jagged crown and declaring he’s achieved “maximum volume” by filling it with crisps. They’re both making more sense than the PD at this point. And then Jerzy—because of course Jerzy turns up—barges in carrying a stolen quiche from the staff fridge, announcing it’s lunch and the copier’s jammed because someone tried to feed it a graphic organiser.

I blink, and the facilitator’s voice is still going, talking about “reasonable domains” for polynomial functions, and I’m back in the room, pen in hand, trying to catch the threads of my own thinking before they unravel completely. It’s lunchtime. Everyone else is out at the bistro. I’m here, writing this, trying to file the morning’s nonsense somewhere it can’t hurt me, so I can go back this afternoon and sit through whatever they throw next.

And maybe that’s the point of this scribbling—not to make a perfect argument or a polished critique, but to reclaim a bit of my own mind in the middle of it. To remember that what they’re selling as “rigour” isn’t neutral, isn’t universal, and isn’t built for all of us. And to remind myself—and maybe you, if you’re reading over my shoulder—that it’s not madness to want something better.

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And just to be clear—this piece today isn’t a criticism of anyone in the room. Not my colleagues (certainly not—they’re enduring it alongside me), and not even my employer (oh, no). This is about institutional inertia, the great grinding machinery that keeps rolling because no one quite remembers how to stop it. We’re here, doing this, because somewhere, at some point, someone signed a purchase order for a programme—a whole pallet of Hess’ books to hand out like rations, the accompanying slides beamed at us until our retinas give up. Someone, somewhere, some entity, is profiting from this. And my mind, faced with the sheer inevitability of it, is having trouble staying present, slipping instead into those wandering side corridors where Rik is doodling in the margins and Jerzy’s already nicked the quiche.

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Somewhere between “Drivers of Investigation” and “Ask a Series of Probing Questions” I realise I’ve stopped listening. My body is in a district PD for high school maths, but my brain has slipped sideways into that familiar fog where the words are still entering my ears, but the meaning… no.

In my head, Rik from The Young Ones leans in and says, “Boxes, right? This is what we’re doing with our lives now? Cutting up perfectly good paper to make boxes and then graphing the trauma?” I try to refocus, but the facilitator is explaining again how open-ended questions promote equity, and Vyv is already here, scissors in one hand, a paper crown on his head, yelling, “My maximum volume is when I fill it with custard and throw it at the wall!”

They’re both talking over the bit about “building coherence across content connections.” Rik insists that Hess probably has a box for that too—“but it’s a metaphorical one, where they put all the interesting ways of knowing and seal it with duct tape so no one has to deal with them.” Vyv just wants to see if he can make the polynomial explode.

And just as the facilitator starts into “productive struggle,” Jerzy bursts in through a side door in my mind, carrying a stolen staff-room quiche and muttering about how the copier is jammed because someone tried to feed it a graphic organiser. He says it’s lunch, and we should stop pretending this is about teaching and admit it’s performance art for administrators.

The PD voice drones on about “reasonable domains,” but in my head the PA crackles and announces: “And now, please welcome our musical guest… Madness!” And there they are, skanking across my mental stage, while Rik and Vyv dance badly, Jerzy eats quiche straight from the tin, and I sit in my chair, nodding politely, holding a handout about polynomial volume functions, wondering if any of us — real or imagined—actually belong in this room.

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The noise starts before the door even opens—the warm hum of conversations carried back from the bistro, bits of laughter, clinking cutlery still ringing in the air like they’ve smuggled it in. My colleagues filter in, cheeks flushed from the walk, from actual sunlight, still mid-story about the quiche that didn’t taste like it sounded and the server who apparently knew someone’s cousin. I envy them a little. I stayed here with my thoughts, and look where that’s got me—a head full of Rik, Vyv, Jerzy, and Madness, and a handout on polynomial volume functions I will almost certainly never use in exactly the way Hess wants me to.

The afternoon, we’re told, is for Zoom webinars. Which means the same airless content, only now flattened further, pixelated, and piped through a succession of strained smiles and muted microphones. The thought of it makes me sag a little in my chair. This whole day—this entire operation—has been organised around the ALP mind: linear, verbal, step-by-step, explain-your-reasoning-in-bullet-points-or-else. And it’s no wonder GLPs struggle here. It’s not even that we can’t do the content; it’s that the entry points are built for a different species entirely.

Gods, I’m tired already. And it’s not even the sort of tired that a nap would fix. It’s the deep, bone-level tired of sitting in a room where the knowing you carry—the way your mind leaps and weaves—isn’t recognised as knowing at all. Where you’re asked, again and again, to prove yourself in someone else’s language, through someone else’s architecture. And the day isn’t over. Not by half.