Charlotte Lumae, M.Ed.

08/03/2026

When you need to write your own algebraic expression for a word problem, do you ever feel unsure of how to start, with all those words and numbers tossed together like salad? Coloring might help. If we take our time and color code every quantity in the problem, write what each color stands for, then read the whole thing one more time, this might unlock the big picture for us.

07/15/2026

A good drawing can really help you get your point across, and every time you draw, you get better at using a pencil. You can take your time learning to read and write. Build some words, look at some prints of oil paintings, build a fort, fill it with corn, draw it, write about it, talk about it. No need to rush. You've got this.

07/01/2026

🎉 Celebrating 15 years of my tutoring microbusiness! Treated myself to a liberating wobble stool from Uncaged Ergonomics. Really enjoying the super smooth movement, effortless height adjustment, and solid build. So much easier to listen to my body and seek out movement while I'm working.

06/26/2026

Respect to NeuroWild telling it like it is. We need to get real about how teachers and behavior therapists so often disregard the human rights of Autistic students. We cannot make things better if we don't see the problem.

This is how non-affirming therapy looks to me.

It doesn’t happen like this everywhere.
But it does happen.

I don’t have any other words about it right now.
I just have anger.

Em

06/20/2026

Do you like the standard column method for recording long multiplication? Would you like to learn a different way to take notes about your work? We can try a few different methods and see what makes the most sense to you today.

05/08/2026

Do you feel confused by logarithms? You are not alone! I think they are pretty confusing too! I made myself this video to try to help me understand the basics of the notation at least. Maybe you will find it helpful too, or if it isn't helpful, hopefully it is funny, which may be more important.

03/05/2026

Who writes these word problems, and why don't they care about sheep??? We solved their fence construction problem hypothetically, but we do not endorse this project. No sheep were harmed during the calculation of our solutions.

02/22/2026

Sometimes people say that we Autistic people are better with static information than dynamic information. They present it as a fact about how "the Autistic brain" works.

As an Autistic person who knows many other Autistic people, with and without accompanying intellectual disability, language impairment, or other conditions, I assure you that this is a vast overgeneralization. The key thing we must remember is that autism is heterogenous, that is, autism is not the same for everyone. That includes how non-Autistic people interpret our Autistic behavior as well as how we experience our own Autism.

It is well known that Autistic people often take longer or have more difficulty with everyday transitions than non-Autistic people. I have no argument with that. However, our difficulty is not necessarily with dynamic information over static information. Our difficulty transitioning is often based on how comfortably absorbed we are, rather than whether the information we are absorbed in is static or dynamic.

Here are some examples.

I love to observe water flowing, especially when light plays over the moving water, and this is one of the most dynamic patterns you can see. If you carefully watch a creek flow, or even watch the water flow from a faucet, the experience is never the same. It can be entrancing for me, seeing and hearing and feeling the endless variation within the theme of water flowing. However, if you look at water flow in a cursory way, as many non-Autistic people do, you may think, wow, okay, it's just a faucet. It's just a sidewalk drain. It's just a drop of water hanging in the sunshine. It's just a creek, Charlotte, get over it, it's time to go. Hurry up. Sorry everybody, Charlotte needs extra time because she gets stuck on the same thing a lot. But is it really the same thing? That depends on your level of granularity. Many Autistic people are capable of a very high level of granularity for certain things, and many non-Autistic people interpret this as a highly fixed interest.

Sometimes the amount of information can be so dynamic that it is truly overwhelming. For example, it took me a long time, as a child, to learn how to get in and out of the shower. I had to learn ways to modulate the experience so I didn't take in all that dynamic information at once so suddenly. Once I figured out how to accommodate myself getting in and out of the shower, I liked to take showers very much. From a non-Autistic perspective, I was a dawdler, or maybe had a mysterious anxiety about showers. From my perspective, I was working on a complex hydropower engineering problem.

Autistic people deal with tricky transitions whether we are dealing with static or dynamic information. Let's consider fixed rules at school or work. If the rules do not make sense to us, as Autistic people, it can be extremely hard to transition into that space. We don't get used to things as easily or quickly as other people, and the unfairness, inconsistency, or inefficiency of a fixed rule will continue to stand out to us no matter how fixed it is.

For example, in math, there is a fixed rule about omitting the coefficient 1 in front of a variable. You don't write 1x. You just write x. I have never made peace with that rule. To me it is always a bit abrasive. I lose a tiny piece of life energy each time I must conform to standard form. I accommodate myself by strongly visualizing the 1 in front of the naked variable. Then I lose another tiny piece of life energy unhooking myself from that experience, and moving on within the fixed math system. People who just get used to standard form do not deal with this.

If we find a static information system that fully suits us and contains no snags, sure, we will prefer that, but those systems are rare. A dynamic information system can be more comfortable if it doesn't contain too many snags for us. The “for us” part is key. Some things that other people see as snags, we see as key supports for understanding. Some things that we see as snags, other people see as part of a smoothly running information system. Either way, when this dissonance with the mainstream happens to you past a certain point, congratulations, you are Autistic. Whether a system is static or dynamic, you are operating in your own time and space, you are Takiwātangaa, as they say in Maori.

01/24/2026

If you're not in the mood to read a book today, how about reading a bouncy ball model of the sun?

12/12/2025

You can take up all the space you need to do your math work. You can write as big as you need to. You can use a whole page, or many pages, for one problem, if it helps you understand what you are doing while you get through the assignment. You can write as many steps as you need. You can draw as many diagrams as you need. Accommodate yourself while you work. If a teacher needs you to turn in a short list of answers on a separate page, fine, then give them that after you finish your own work, but don't let it stop you from taking all the space you need for your process. Some people do not need to see the whole situation drawn out. Some people do. Some people can do a lot of steps in their head, completely accurately. Good for them. Sometimes people like this will ignorantly ask why you are writing and drawing so much just for one little problem. Just let them know that's how your brain works. You do you. Own your brain fearlessly. Your brain does not belong to anyone else.