Kids and Disability

Today was a whole day's work and involved lots of screaming over the voices of noisy students, which might be why i feel really tired just now. But there's something from today that has set me thinking... and feeling. This was going to be a diary entry, but then it felt like the kind of diary entry i might want others to read, so here it is. (as time passes, i'm letting this blog get more and more personal!).

This evening, I had a meeting with someone who works in an inclusive school (disabled and non-disabled kids). The point of the meeting was to discuss possible ways of working together, doing workshops with kids there, having them work with our teachers on inclusive classrooms, etc. It was a great meeting in many ways- the people we met were lovely, and so many possibilities emerged that i really felt it could open a new chapter of my journey as a would-be educator. And yet, I returned feeling slightly disconcerted, not feeling quite at ease, feeling like something in the evening was bothering me. this blog post is an attempt to examine that feeling.

At one point, while talking about teacher sensitization to disability issues, i shared my concern that we sometimes focus exclusively on students with visible and obvious disabilities, forgetting that the word covers a whole range that we cannot ignore... yes, there is the blind student but there is also the severely visually impaired student... in the first case, the teacher certainly knows about it and probably won't be too insensitive (provided he/ she is a decent human being), but in the latter he/she is more likely to be hurtful. I shared an example of a teacher who once scolded me bitterly for walking up to the board to read what she had written and how I internalized guilt for not being able to read from my seat-- like there was something bad about me if I couldn't do that. I know, it may sound like a small thing to you-- i know it did to them-- but think about it. I was 10 then; I'm 23 now, but I still remember the scolding and the bitter shame I felt afterwards. It obviously left a strong impression and, in retrospect, I believe it really affected my perception of my own illness. Even today, I am embarrassed to ask for help reading something at a distance or requesting a "favor" like larger print copies.

Another example: In 5th grade, I used to hide the pink chalk. I am partially green-pink blind, and pink chalk against green boards used to make classrooms impossible for me. So, once I was thought of as "responsible" and given duties like making sure there was enough chalk near the board, I used to hide pink chalk at the back of the box and keep putting out other colors. Then, when I knew we were running out and only pink chalk remained, I used dread the coming weeks. Looking back, I can't believe I didn't simply tell my teacher that pink against green didn't work for me and request her to use different colors; I highly doubt she would have told me to deal with it and continued using pink. But somehow, the fear, the sense of shame, took over, and I pulled myself through those dreaded "all pink" weeks.

Once, in 7th grade, I couldn't copy down all the Math HW questions from the board, and I was sick of always losing marks over "copied wrong" questions (even if they were solved right, the teacher would give you no marks if you had copied a question wrong from the board). So I called the girl I then thought of as my "best friend" and asked her to give me the questions over the phone. Her mother took the phone from her and screamed at me, telling me not to take away her daughter's precious study time, and telling me that if I didn't copy the questions down on my own, it was my problem and no one else's responsibility. The woman had known me through 4 years and 3-4 surgeries, so it's not like she could pleade ignorance of my eye condition. But there she was, telling me, just as my 5th grade teacher had, that this was all my fault. And, once again, I believed her. I remember crying after I hung up, and I never called this friend for help again.

Over the years, many "larger" issues emerged. I had to study through audio tapes. I needed to take frequent long breaks from school for one surgery after another. On many days, my teachers had to accept that i was still listening to them even though I would keep my head down for the entire period because my eyes hurt. I had to give board exams with a scribe, which was complicated because i was giving exams in the "blind student" category although I wasn't blind (the exams have been broken up into "seeing" and "blind" categories-- the first are the normal exams; the second are the ones that someone else writes for you. No one seems ever to have thought of a "large print" category). In college, I had to make my own large print copies of texts, had to convince professors to give me extensions on papers when i suddenly took unwell, had to even write exams with my left hand when my glandular problem got really bad. Lots of big and small things like that came along in the way to my education.

Strangely, though, none of the supposedly larger issues left as strong an impression as those 5th grade scoldings. They hurt, they were struggles, but the emotion with which i now look back is triumph, is pride, is the sense that I proved stronger than the obstacles. Those long ago scoldings, though, still inspire an inexplicable sense of shame and, yes, even fear.

Of course, that's partly because as i grew older, I learned to deal with all these emotions, learned to talk to my teachers about my struggles. I was lucky to have some incredible teacher sin high school; not only did these women understand and support me completely, they also voiced their admiration for my efforts and went out of their way to help me succeed, recording books on audio cassettes for me, giving me photocopied notes when I couldn't take notes in class, exempting me from mapwork...thanks to them I completed school with good grades and with a strong sense of self. I owe them a lot.

But yeah, coming back to today's conversation, all these reflections really forced me to go back to the important role a teacher can play- incredible damage and incredible healing. They reaffirm to me why it is so important for teachers to be aware of, and sensitive to, the needs of their individual students. Also the need to involve the parents in the process-- i don't know if I ever told my Mom about those scoldings; I'm sure she would have taken it up in school if I had, but maybe the 9 or 10 year old me was too scared/ ashamed to do so. Not every disability is immediatley obvious, but over months of working with a child, reading their letters of absence, observing them in class, one should be able to tell if something is amiss. At the very least, we need to equip kids with the skills and the courage to articulate such fears, worries, and insecurities.

"How" is question number two. This blog post is still at "Why," written from a very personal space.