It's complicated

I've been following the story of the college instructor who fell into conflict with a student in her class, possibly but not definitively related to her inability to properly deal with his stutter. His side, hers.

Nothing about the story's straightforward, which is, I suppose, what makes it compelling. On the one hand, it's about college. On the other, the professor in question is an adjunct who stopped, years ago, at an MA, and the student a tenth-grader taking her community-college class, factors that could make the interaction closer to something that would go on in a high school.

More interestingly: On the one hand, it's about disability. Without announcing to the class exactly what a student suffers from (and see Flavia on this), a good instructor must both accomodate behavior that will seem unusual to the rest of the class, and make the class work for other students as well. This is not something that's yet come up in classes I've taught, but in one I took, there was a (male) student I can only guess was somewhere high-functioning on the autism/Asperger's spectrum, whose blurting included loud, really projected belching. The (female) instructor was in every sense a pro, and dealt with it beautifully, and the other students, all or nearly all grad students from various fields who'd already taught classes themselves, were not going to have the confused reaction a more typical class might have had. College students are not going to necessarily know how to differentiate between Asperger's and awkward/entitled. I mean, I couldn't, either, from a medical perspective, but once you've logged a certain number of hours in classrooms, once you've logged a certain number in life, you start to be sensitive to at least the possibility that someone behaving strangely maybe can't help it. And a stutter, unlike Asperger's (although some online are noting that these two often go hand in hand), will be obvious as something not readily controlled, even to other high school students.

On the other, in cases like these, there's a gender component - a possible "mansplaining" angle. But can someone whose inappropriate timing and choice of words stems from a diagnosed disorder "mansplain"? Seems doubtful. To semi-address Flavia's question, while there will always be "mean girls" and mean boys who live to make fun of "weird," there's another possibility in cases like these that only becomes clear when you take gender into account. However nerdy and eccentric, and even (to a degree - search for "Asperger's" and "girls" for the ample literature on this) whether technically on a spectrum or not, girls are expected to be social and act "normal." Contrary to popular belief, this does not come naturally to all girls. The penalties for behaving strangely and looking unkempt are simply much higher for girls than they are for boys.

Meanwhile, there's a space for boys who come across as somehow different, but are maybe (or maybe not even) especially good at math, or even especially knowledgeable about something else. They may be bullied (and Dan Savage has discussed how his straight-but-nerdy brother was bullied more than he was for being gay-but-not-so-nerdy), this should not be ignored. But under certain circumstances, by certain teachers, often by parents, extreme geekiness in boys is interpreted as a sign that underneath the messy, unwashed hair lies the brain of an Einstein. A girl whose natural inclinations are along these lines will shampoo, condition, and blow-dry. A theoretical female student in Flavia's class may be someone who'd be a "that guy," a "too-brilliant-to-bathe," had she been born male, but she doesn't have the option. She may on some level resent male students she interprets as falling into this category, without considering the possibility that they have a disability, noticing only that they're viewed as budding geniuses. She may even herself have the very same disability, but have learned to compensate for it while quite young, maybe even never to have been diagnosed, because that can apparently happen with girls. Point being, whatever his personal struggles, "that guy" may irritate male classmates, but could well be the object of envy for some female ones, and may inspire something along those lines in female instructors, many of whom are, of course, grown-up geeky girls.

The problem remains, as Flavia notes, that an instructor can never announce to the class which students are merely "that guy," and which should be dealt with with utmost sensitivity because they've been diagnosed and are suffering. Nor, given the ambiguity of diagnosis, do we ever know for certain that various "that guy" students aren't undiagnosed cases, nor that over-diagnosis hasn't so labelled male students who might be better classified as "too brilliant to bathe." And sometimes, as with the boy with the stutter, a student may both have a diagnosis and feel entitled to participate in a lecture class on account of being young, on account of having been home-schooled, etc. Confusing! Are we all sufficiently confused?

So my own approach, if I ever confront something like this in class, would be to model myself after the instructor who dealt so smoothly with the belching student. Be so blasé that students follow your lead. Keep your calm, and be respectful, but without an over-the-top, 'Look, I'm being respectful of the badly-behaved student' attitude. Acknowledge all blurting/over-participating students sometimes but not quite as much as they'd like. Before the semester is even under way, make some general remarks about the need for everyone to get a chance to speak or, if it's a lecture, about how much speaking is appropriate, both so that no one feels individually picked on, and to pre-reassure the rest of the class that non-blurted remarks will get heard, too.