In this initial phase of our open-ended course, we both thought it important to provide a fair amount of reference for both your Professor and her Teaching Assistant/designated editor.

This first installment was planned for the standard early morning release time, but was delayed on account of the Professor insisting on a 7th and then 8th pass of revisions.

Be advised that the following “Intro” attempts to cover major and relevant reference information regarding approximately 79 years of Rita’s life. As such, please be forewarned that various instances of trauma, loss, and prejudicial treatment will be discussed.

Future installments of Office Hours will not be remotely this long nor this “much” emotionally.

Rita: An Expanded Biography

In the years following the end of World War II, Rita Deyoe was born on a farm in Coldwater, Kansas. She was the youngest in a family where she was doted on by 7 brothers and a sister. For the entirety of his life, she was closest to her brother Duane and later his wife, the incomparable Jane.

She went to college at Kansas State University, and in 1968, she went to teach English abroad in Colombia for two years. That adventure would help fundamentally shape the rest of her life.

After completing her Master’s Degree and then her PhD in Linguistics, she made her home in suburban Dallas, Texas. One of her favorite things to do was going to a particular salsa club, drinking a shot of Courvoisier, and dancing the night away.

One night, she met a Cuban man who was a particularly great dance partner, despite his arm being in a sling from a workplace injury. He was a refugee who came over on the Mariel Boatlift seeking a better life. She was fascinated to find out that his father had also been a refugee, a journalist who fled persecution in China. Rita’s own Huguenot ancestors (from where her family name derived) had fled religious persecution in France.

They danced the night away.

The next day, he called her eight times.

This was very much in the days before caller ID of any sort, so she only could have known because he had left her messages on her answering machine.

While initially put off by his persistence, she liked that the next time she saw him at the club, she could tell that he was singularly interested in her. He asked her followup questions in a sincere effort to get to know her, not just put on being interested in her as a person. The more they talked, the more she felt like she was talking to someone she could raise a family of her own with.

They got married and she hyphenated her last name, connecting hers to the compound family name that his dad formed by combining his Cantonese “Chiu” with a Spanish suffix “-llán” (the double L pronounced like a Y), forming “Chiullán.”

Her husband’s given name was José, but he went by Moisés.

When Moisés’ refugee dad arrived in Cuba, not only had he decided to “Cubanize” his family name, but he also adopted José as his new, “assimilated” first name. He met and married a Cuban woman of mixed heritage named Elvira, and when they had children, all of his sons were “dynastically” named José as well, and all with different middle names.

When Rita and José Moisés had their first son, they named him Moisés. He grew up sort of a “Junior” but not quite, in both name and who he took after. “Little Moses” faced bullying over his “weird name” as early as preschool. That would mark the first of various times throughout her son’s early years that Rita would have a very stern word with a teacher about “othering” her mixed-race child.

Three years after Moisés was born, the family welcomed a second son, Eduardo. “Eddie” was a joyful baby who loved to play with his big brother. They would watch decades-old sitcoms on Nick At Nite just as intently as they would He-Man, Transformers, and other toy commercials masquerading as entertainment.

When Eddie was found to not be meeting expected linguistic and neurocognitive developmental milestones, Rita and José Moisés took him to a specialist. “Baby Eddie” was a toddler and still communicating like an infant. He was diagnosed as being on the Autism spectrum, a diagnosis that would change the course of the entire family’s lives.

His tendency to act out and just act starkly differently than other children would make every day an unexpected adventure. Whether on trips to the store, navigating his inclusion when his brother’s friends would come over to play, or just the course of a Saturday afternoon at home, a crisis could erupt at any moment.

“Normal” was a word that Eddie’s mom was convinced God had created while laughing uproariously.

Other parents at their neighborhood Kroger would scold Rita “why don’t you control your child?!” or “you shouldn’t bring that out in public!” as if he were something less than human. In both interpersonal and professional settings, Rita faced an onslaught of blame from people with nothing better to do with their time. They would cite “something they read” about how children like Eddie were the way that they were due to “refrigerator mothers,” whose lack of warmth and affection spontaneously caused Autism, not genetic and environmental factors.

The original paper written by Leo Kanner theorizing the Refrigerator Mother cause for Autism was published in 1943. That publication cited “coldness” from either or both parents as the cause. A second paper, focusing on mothers in particular, was published in 1949.

It ought to surprise no one that blaming mothers for “non-normal” children in the 1950s caught on like wildfire.

The Refrigerator Mother theory continued to be universally treated as settled science anecdotally in American society until it was debunked in the mid-1960s. In 1969, the author of the originating papers insisted that he had been regularly misquoted and fully disavowed the idea that parental “coldness” (specifically from mothers) had anything to do with causing Autism, or that he had ever promoted the concept.

The damage had been done.

As of this writing, people still push the original iteration of the Refrigerator Mother theory as fact and settled science. Yet others including one of the most powerful sitting Cabinet secretaries contend that Autism is caused by vaccines, which has also been thoroughly debunked by actual science. A more extreme, sort of “enhanced” version of the Refrigerator Mother theory contends that Autism is caused by child abuse, casting all parents of Autistic children as abusers by default.

All of those ideas were “out there” when Eddie was born in the mid-1980s.

This entire time, Rita was teaching a full course load. She was teaching graduate school while simultaneously co-parenting two children, one with special needs and one in the “gifted and talented” program.

She incorporated talking about the radically different linguistic and sociocultural developmental paths of her sons into her lectures. Her students loved her for her willingness to be vulnerable and open about real challenges that they could encounter in their classrooms, schools…or homes.

At various points, her former or current students would end up her elder son’s teacher.

One, in particular, decided that “Moses” should go by the English equivalent of his given name “because it would be easier for him.” He had run through all of the pamphlet-size “books” in her classroom in a matter of a few weeks.

She knew that he was reading the likes of Judy Blume and Roald Dahl at home. She decided, without consulting Rita, that it would be best for him to stay in from recess and P.E. because his academic mind would be better engaged reading in the library. She gifted “Moses” a copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes, which he kept at school and read in those isolated hours in the library.

He was six years old.

When her son started having terrifying nightmares of murderers and haunting, howling hounds, Rita made short work of making sure her asthmatic son got right back to having recess and P.E., and he got a new homeroom teacher.

His homeroom teacher also got a new advisor for her Masters dissertation.

Rita told her eldest that his name was his name…but names stick when you’re that young. Everyone at school called him “Moses” all the way through high school, even though he was “Moisés” to his dad and interchangeably Moses and Moisés to his mom at home.

Roughly two decades later, after Rita’s “gifted and talented” son returned to his home state after going away to college 1000 miles from home, the family unit of four had already been through countless challenges along the way.

The greatest challenges were yet to come.

Eddie had aged out of the public school system, and his dad had retired from teaching to take care of him and the household full time.

Moisés had come back to Texas, but moved to Austin to take a job with Apple rather than come back to Dallas. Every school trip to Austin for years had convinced him that was where he “fit” right, and he leapt at the opportunity.

In late 2008, José Moisés took what would be his final trip back to visit Cuba. Upon his return to the United States, he was detained, interrogated, physically assaulted, and threatened with deportation or arrest under “enemy combatant” statutes by US border officers for “refusing to speak correct English” and “not showing proper respect” to them.

He asserted that the newly elected President, Barack Obama, would make sure that people like them never had the ability to do that again, and that he would never be treated like a criminal for completely legally returning from his home country with completely above-board documents.

A couple weeks later, he had a massive stroke in the shower.

Rita called her eldest son who was in Florida spending Christmas with his then in-laws, and told him the doctors said that now was the time to get on a plane to say goodbye.

By the time “Little Moses” got there on the next flight out, José Moisés had stabilized, but he was still in the ICU. He had right side paralysis, and had lost the ability to speak coherently, both of which ended up being permanent conditions.

Rita kept teaching.

She kept teaching while caring for José Moisés and for Eddie, both of whom required full time attention.

Two years later, Eddie received his second big, life-changing diagnosis.

What had been thought to be and had been treated as an upper respiratory infection turned out to be a tumor growing on his trachea. Eddie began aggressive chemo treatment. His brother, who a couple years before had been upgraded to “Big Moses,” made more frequent drives up from Austin to Dallas to help ease Eddie’s anxiety and resistance to the various invasive and scary aspects of his treatment.

Rita kept teaching.

She had Eddie “guest lecture” more often in her classes as his health allowed.

Over the next year or so, Rita took Eddie on various “bucket list” trips to meet his heroes from across pop culture, but mostly Star Trek. William Shatner once took him by the shoulders, fully in-character as Captain Kirk, and insisted that he had to fight the cancer, by God, if he wanted to get well enough to serve on the Enterprise.

When Eddie’s lungs weren’t strong enough to come off of a respirator following a procedure, his big brother had to race against time to get from Austin to Dallas, pick up his dad from the family home, and get them both to the hospital to say goodbye before the orderlies had to take Eddie away.

It was the week after Rita’s birthday, and just over a couple weeks shy of what would have been Eddie’s 25th.

Eddie would have turned 40 on April 11th of this year.

Rita kept teaching.

The portions of her course lectures dedicated to Eddie necessarily shifted a bit, both in content and delivery. It meant everything to her, knowing she was continuing to make a difference in the lives of both English Language Learners and their teachers.

Much of her teaching moved to online-only. She began fostering dogs in addition to continuing to be full-time caretaker for José Moisés.

Her newly-only son continued visiting with great frequency. His then-wife indicated to him that once he “finished grieving,” she hoped he could start spending less time with his family and that maybe they could move back to Florida to be closer to her family.

They divorced some time later.

He is now in a committed, long-term relationship with a Canadian who is exponentially more sad to have never met his brother than his ex-wife ever was happy to have known Eddie in the final five years of his life.

Rita loves her future daughter-in-law arguably just shy of how much she loves her actual son. She is blameless and can do no wrong, as far as Rita is concerned.

José Moisés passed away on Halloween morning in 2022.

Rita kept teaching.

She started fostering yet more dogs, more than she could physically keep up with.

Rita became more and more captivated with “living” on Facebook, and having very little social contact outside of it.

Then came her fall in February of 2025.

The final course she started teaching just prior was taken over by colleagues in her stead. She tried finishing it out herself while laid up in bed on painkillers and fighting infections, with her son reading student assignments to her and taking her dictation to provide course feedback. At a certain point, she just couldn’t keep up, but she had more than earned a break.

There’s no way that one could try to encompass an entire 79-year life (so far) in one fell swoop, but this is enough to get us started and give you an idea of why this is an open-ended seminar.

In the weeks to come, you’ll hear more about the challenges Rita has overcome despite the odds, along with much more on Eddie in particular.

What Rita Taught Me: From Chris

Before I dig into the previously promised story of the night of my 42nd birthday and the car wreck, we already have our first letter from a former student to pass along. It is perfect, in that it is both the sort of “testimonial” that Rita insists she does not need, but which perfectly reveals why she deserves and ought to hear them.

Here’s Chris:

I'm not sure, with all the students you've had, that you remember me, but I took classes with you online through ACE [American College of Education] during the COVID years while I was teaching abroad in China. You were SOOO helpful to me in learning how to do what I was doing in such an immersive ELL [English Language Learner] setting!! Even now as I have returned to the States and have been teaching ELA in public school in Arkansas (and even though they are not ELLs in the traditional sense, these Arkansan linguists very much still fit the profile hahaha). I have been thinking about you A LOT recently as I am moving back to my hometown (…) and am RIGHT NOW studying to take my ESL endorsement exam on Friday!

THANK YOU for all of your help, the stories, the emails, the recommendation letter from you that I still use!! I appreciate your experience and expertise! DON'T STOP!!!

Chris, you can rest assured that though her memory is much spottier than it once was, and she had trouble placing the name…she absolutely does still remember you!

For my part, I remember her directly telling me about you back during COVID, because these details line up directly to a student she told me that she felt was a perfect example of why she wanted to keep teaching despite the increasingly dispiriting atmosphere in education across the Southern U.S. and especially Texas.

She’s glad to hear from you, and we both want you to know that this was a big help in motivating her to embrace the newsletter as a way of keeping in touch with people and keeping good memories fresh.

I know that especially as time passes, it will be less likely that she remembers individual people, but it’s stories like this that will hopefully serve to pass along memories of the impact of her work for the future.

About the Editor: Life, the Universe, and Everything

In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s revealed that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is…42.

That’s it, no further explanation. It’s one of the more memorable metatextual references in the last however many decades of science fiction, primarily because it isn’t explained…much like life itself.

I don't like celebrating my birthday or making a big deal out of it, and haven’t for a long time. My 42nd sure didn’t motivate me to change that.

One thing that has also remained constant since I left home for college is that my mom always calls me on my birthday, generally just as she is about to watch the 10’o'clock news.

On a cold-and-getting-colder February night last year, I noted it was almost 11p.m. and that my mom…hadn’t called me yet. When I tried calling her, it went straight to voicemail.

She always kept her phone charged. Weird.

I checked my call log and saw that I hadn’t heard from her in a couple of days.

That is when felt in my bones that something was seriously wrong. I called my partner and told her what I was worried might have happened.

Then, I loaded up my car in the middle of the night to drive the three hours north from Austin to Dallas.

Five minutes out of my driveway, an SUV blasted through a stop sign at speed and T-boned me on the passenger side. I tried steering hard left to avoid being hit, but it was unavoidable.

My Subaru Forester rolled over two and a half times, landing upside-down.

The driver side window was already mostly shattered out, and the seatbelt had pulled taut such that I was secure but not pinned in. I repositioned myself as quickly as I could so that I wouldn’t break my neck when I released the seatbelt.

My iPhone had already notified my partner I had been in a wreck, and it had asked me if I wanted it to notify emergency services.

I crawled out the shattered window, called my partner to let her know I was alive, and started trying assess whether I was all right while waiting for EMS to arrive.

Aside from a bruise on my arm, serious muscular strain that is still giving me issues 14 months later, and a major concussion?

I was “fine.”

To be clear, I wasn’t “fine” and still am not, but I was alive and didn’t have to go to the hospital.

When the paramedics arrived, they asked how many were still stuck in the car. To a one, they told me that based on what the car looked like, people generally don’t survive those sorts of wrecks, let alone self-extract from the vehicle before EMS arrives.

Adrenaline is a hell of a self-produced drug, I guess?

On a related note, if you or someone you know can personally recommend a personal injury attorney or firm, rather than from a podcast or other ad, I’m all ears.

I was in no condition to drive, so I left messages for her next door neighbors who I knew had a key to get in, and they shortly got back to me. She was alive, but had fallen getting out of the tub shower and was in bad shape.

The important thing was that she was alive.

14 months later, she’s alive and thriving.

It has been difficult keeping up with the influx of messages along with generous donations and subscriptions to this very newsletter, so thank you all from the bottom of both of our hearts. We still have a very steep hill to climb financially, but bigger miracles have happened in less than a week.

Rita has continued doing her five days a week of physical therapy and occupational therapy, often wearing one of various Austin FC jerseys I’ve gotten for her. I’m convinced that she helped break the streak of bad luck the team has been experiencing, resulting in their Copa Tejas rivalry win against Houston Dynamo last night. I’m headed to visit her now to watch the match, and I look forward to her enjoying seeing the players she refers to as “el de Catalunya” and “the Albanian” and “our fast young guy from Ontario” all have a great night on a time delay.

You should have received an email that includes the Course Syllabus. We will be posting that as an “extra” installment of the newsletter this coming Wednesday so that it is found right toward the chronological beginning of our course materials in the newsletter archive. This should provide easier indexing should you need to consult it later on.

I should have done it as a standalone post in the first place, but if that’s the biggest thing I screwed up this week, I’m doing better than average, I suppose.

Regardless of how today went, here’s to a better tomorrow. See you Sunday (and Wednesday before that just this one time), bright and early.

-Moisés

Thank you for subscribing to this weekly update from Dr. Rita Deyoe-Chiullán, written and edited by her son and Teaching Assistant, Moisés Chiullán.

The best ways to contribute to Rita’s ongoing care are detailed in this post. WhatRitaTaughtMe.com is the best way to pass around to anyone you think would be willing to help financially or who would benefit from knowing her story.

Whether you were already one of her nearly six decades of students or not, you are now! Office Hours will remain “pay what you can” on an ongoing basis. Please just keep showing up for class.

If you have a story about “What Rita Taught Me,” please send us an email (WhatRitaTaughtMe@gmail.com) , whether you learned something from her in a classroom (in-person or online), or even just from reading Office Hours.