Course Number One In Masters Completed

I have officially completed my first course in my Masters. I am glad in a way because we are in the final weeks on the normal teaching year here so it is busy and eventful and I am tired. However, I felt so refreshed from taking a course and knowing that I still "had it." It also made me realize how much I did not know and in all honesty, this last Monday when I didn't have a class to go to I was disappointed.

Some lasting thoughts that are relatively to all from my course revolve around the whole term "disabled." I am very supportive of the new terminology that is being use when it refers to learning disabilities as learning differences. I do not think this is some unjust semantic word play but instead a closer indication of what the situation is. All people learn in different ways and in the way our society is set up, some people's differences stick out and cause them to struggle and need adaptations.

I will also take with me this thought of how so many people have individualized programs, ample support, and team support meetings through out their schooling, only to become inactive or unable or not knowledgeable and unsupported to lead the quality of life they are able to. There are still segregated institutions here where people are sent to live behind closed doors, there are sheltered workshops here where people with disabilities work in a boring assembly line for as low as 25 cents an hour, and as admitted by the coordinator of disability services at our local community college, rarely does someone with a labeled "disability" who starts actually finish.

And it is easy at this point to say...But really how many people are we talking? One in five Americans have a disability, making people with disabilities the largest minority group in the USA. Like gender and ethnicity, what we label as disabled is a charters of human beings. Disabilities are natural. But is that how we perceive it in society?

When I look at my students who have been labeled with multitudes of things, I want to believe that they have the opportunity to achieve and make goals and be respected in society. I see real learning taking place, I see a smartness and drive that has already in their short lives been smashed and degraded, and more then anything, I see a want to be accepted. Who are we to say that they are less then because they need to be taught a different way? Who are others to act superior because they can learn better a different way?

As Katie Snow says in her article Disabilities Are Natural, " When we adopt the belief that disabilities are natural, we will be able to look into the face of a person with a disability and we will presume competence." We will not presume how can we make them normal.