Don't Limit Me

I think most human beings respond the same way when they see or hear of someone with some type of disability. "Oh I feel so bad" .. "That poor child".. It's second nature. What most human beings don't understand what they're doing when they say or think these things. What this kind of sympathy does is separates themselves from the individual that they are referring to. It puts you (the person without a disability) in a more privileged position. I'm not saying I'm perfect, there have definitely been times when I have passed someone in a wheelchair and thought to myself how awful it must be for them. But I have no idea what their life is like. Maybe there are things that they can do a whole lot better than I can (for example, maybe they're better at not procrastinating their blog posts). What I'm trying to get at here is they have a disability, but their disability is not who they are. The abilities of an individual with down syndrome is directly related to what we expect of them. The minute we stick them in an self-contained classroom we are saying that this is all you're ever going to be, you can't function in a regular ed. society, here color in this book. And maybe it's not conscious, maybe we just don't know any better. After all, knowledge is power. But we can't just stick students, or anyone for that matter, into these "check here" boxes based on what we assume we know about them and their capabilities. It's not always so black and white, we need to do more exploring of the gray space.

We're More Alike Than Different

Teacher to parents: About THAT kid