🧵1) I don't know if my view is appreciated or puzzling to the professor and students in my seminar course on the conquest narratives. It's been enlightening in some ways because it has started to prove my theory that there is a hermeneutic for those who are #ActuallyAutistic

🧵2) I have been quite appreciative of the voices I have connected with, especially here on Twitter (@robertjmonson, @JoLuehmann, etc) that have expanded the space of interpretation I take into consideration when approaching the biblical text.
🧵3) While one cannot be wholly objective about a text (Hermeneutics 101), it has helped me develop a stronger empathy for "interpretations from the edge," minority and philosophical interpretations. Admittedly, this also stems from my own baggage with Evangelicalism.
🧵4) What I learned from the flavor of Evangelicalism I was exposed to in college has more or less been designed to exclude (read: ignore) other voices because of 1) its deep roots in American Imperialism and 2) its implicit ties to a passive form of white supremacy.
🧵5) If you don't believe that, you needn't look much further than the previous presidential administration. Chris Hedges, in his book "American Fascists", connects religious conservatism to fascism, which is "a kind of colonization," according to Rev. Davidson Loehr.
🧵6) He goes on to say that, in both fascism and colonization, there is the subtext of assimilation; an erasing of people's stories. For the #neurodivergent community, it means retraining and robbing us of our neurotype, something that is embedded within our neurophysiology.
🧵7) This is a different struggle altogether and I want to be clear I am not equating neurotype and ethnicity. They intersect; neurodivergence exists within all sections of the population and does not discriminate.
🧵8) That is a long way to say that my experience as a white #autistic person is not the same as someone in the #BIPOC community. When I started asking the question, "How would someone from X background understand this?" my world became even larger.
🧵9) I can't say I've abandoned the standard historical/literary hermeneutic I cut my teeth on because I see it as a basis for all interpretation. To evade the question of original meaning is to commit anachronism, ethnocentrism, and myriad other sins of interpretation.
🧵10) However, with that base of interpretation, I can then approach, though asymptotically, the interpretations of others of different ethnic backgrounds, genders, sexuality, political affiliation, etc. There's a world of interpretation out there.
🧵11) At this point, I can't say I've mastered this. However, it has brought to the fore some new and exciting ways to approach the text. It's strange, it's new, and it's uncomfortable at times. But being Autistic in a neurotypical world means I am uncomfortable most of the time.
🧵12) When you make it a practice of de-centering your faith as I have, you can more easily accept the discomfort of (Derridean) de-construction (This word is used a lot and I don't know if this is what is being referenced, so I'm being explicit for that reason).
🧵13) Derrida never eschewed an original meaning of the text, which is how he's often characterized (and demonized) by his critics. Even if he did, that does not dismiss the value of identifying the possibility of knowing a text extremely well in its context.
🧵14) Once I allowed myself the freedom to identify the systems of power in a text, identifying dichotomies, I found myself progressing into other interpretations beyond my admittedly limited scope. It has been a fascinating journey and I hope it continues
🧵15) P.S. Feel free to challenge, elaborate, or comment on what I've written. I openly admit to theory of mind issues, so if I've mischaracterized others or was not clear about something, I gladly accept criticism. This was all very stream-of-consciousness. I love you all madly.
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More from Education

You asked. So here are my thoughts on how osteopathic medical students should respond to the NBOME.

(thread)


Look, even before the Step 2 CS cancellation, my DMs and email were flooded with messages from osteopathic medical students who are fed up with the NBOME.

There is *real* anger toward this organization. Honestly, more than I even heard about from MD students and the NBME.

The question is, will that sentiment translate into action?

Amorphous anger on social media is easy to ignore. But if that anger gets channeled into organized efforts to facilitate change, then improvements are possible.

This much should be clear: begging the NBOME to reconsider their Level 2-PE exam is a waste of your time.

Best case scenario, you’ll get another “town hall” meeting, a handful of platitudes, and some thoughtful beard stroking before being told that they’re keeping the exam.

Instead of complaining to the NBOME, here are a few things that are more likely to bring about real change.
An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.


It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.

Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).

Rate, or words-read-per-minute, is the easiest. Faster reading speeds are EVIDENCE of fluency development but attempting to 'teach' children(or anyone) to read faster is fallacious (Carver, 1985) and will result in processing deficit which in young readers will be catastrophic.

Reading rate is dependent upon eye-movements and cognitive processing development along with orthographic development (more on this later).

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(1) Kushner is worth $324 million.
(2) Since 2016, Kushner has connived, with Saudi help, to force the Qataris (literally at a ship's gunpoint) to "loan" him $900 million.
(3) This is consistent with the Steele dossier.
(4) Kushner is unlikely to ever have to pay the "loan" back.


2/ So as you read about his tax practices, you should take from it that it's practices of this sort that ensure that he's able to extort money from foreign governments while Trump is POTUS without ever having to pay the money back. It also explains why he's in the Saudis' pocket.

3/ It's why the Saudis *say* he's in their pocket. It's why emoluments and federal bribery statutes matter. It's why Kushner was talking to the Saudi Crown Prince the day before the murdered Washington Post journalist was taken. It's why the Trump administration now does nothing.