John Munro traced how an autistic student’s school day uses up working memory

Professor John Munro’s account of autistic burnout in school began with the assumptions a teacher brings into the room. In the second half of the burnout panel at Think Autism Melbourne, Kyriakos Gold, who hosted that half, asked him to walk the room through what happens cognitively across an autistic student’s classroom day, and how the build up of effortful processing, on tasks that neurotypical peers do automatically, becomes the burnout the first panel had described as a policy failure.

Munro opened by saying he is white, male and a professional, and that he did not want to offend anyone. He still teaches, he said, and whenever he teaches a group he has to make assumptions about how the students learn. Learning, he said, picking up a point he credited to Kathleen, is psychological and also sociological. If a teacher’s assumptions do not match how students learn, they are less likely to succeed and more likely to disengage. The more students have to work to appear neurotypical, the more of their thinking space they use up.