I have so many more thoughts, so little energy to type them.

Case in point: Last Saturday, I sent an email to my teacher, telling him that his class was really difficult for me, because it went really fast, and I couldn’t keep up or ask questions. The next time we had the class he had changed it to allow more time, and he didn’t wait for me to ask questions! He really went out of his way, in my mind, to help me.

So bear up! There are a lot of not-nice people in academia, but there are absolute gems as well.

PS: I hate the excuse that “you won’t get extra time in the real world” because I usually come in the lab for 12-14 hours a day or more to keep up with everyone else, so my extra time is when they’re at the movies or eating dinner or doing laundry or sleeping!

Favouritism is unethical. Professors are supposed to teach fairly and grade objectively. The problem with this teacher’s “logic” (and I use that word advisedly) is that accommodations are not favoritism. What privileged folk don’t get is that all accommodations do is level the playing field. An interpreter, for example, does nothing to help a student get by who can’t master the material: It only gives that student the same exposure to the material that every other student in the classroom already had.

And it is unethical to teach in a way that is a detriment to the class as a whole. For example, it is not ok to show up drunk or unprepared. But, again, this person is using a logical cheat: Changing your teaching style to be more inclusive is hardly detrimental. You’re still giving them the material and you are still expecting them to master it, so where’s the detriment?

I have little patience for whining like that of the lip-reader’s professor. She thinks facing the room is an inconvenience? She should try losing her hearing. And anyway, does she really think anybody can hear her when she’s got her face buried in the blackboard, or in her notes?

As an undergrad myself, accommodations didn’t exist. Which is probably why it took me six years to complete a four-year degree. And another seven to get my doctorate. In grad school, I often ran into problems related to my disability: The Dean who told me other students envied my “special” parking privileges, the professor who was offended when I could not sit through a three-hour class and took stand-up mini-breaks at the back of the room at the 90-minute mark, etc. And when I hurt, I frowned, which got me written up once for having anger” issues.

Now, to the ADHD debate. Which I do think is relevant. My experience, as a professor and as a private-practice psychologist, is that disabilities of all sorts are under-diagnosed, under-treated, and under-accommodated. Don’t know what the hard data is on that, but if I had a nickel for every client I’ve seen over the past 35 years who wasn’t diagnosed ADHD until adulthood, every bipolar kid I had in a class who was thrashing around trying to manage it all by himself, and every high-school student whose teachers refused to follow the IEP, well–I could retire tomorrow. As several people here have already said, many of us tend to try to fly under the radar to avoid discrimination, and those of us who do ask for help frequently don’t get taken seriously (and therefore don’t get diagnosed, etc.).

Lastly, the only kid who ever scared the sauce out of me was neither disabled nor getting accommodations. I expect this is true for many professors, and that the posts on Rate Your Students reflect a cognitive error to do with what sticks out: We are all more afraid of tornadoes, for example, although asthma actually kills more people. Disabled people scare TABs, although TABs statistically do more damage, because we stick out to them.

That said, people who write posts like the ones we read in RYS depress me: Why teach if you don’t love students and the teaching of them?? Do us all, and yourselves as well, a giant favor and go find another line of work.

Beth from Boise, btw, rocks.
.-= Virginia S. Wood, Psy.D.´s last blog ..Disturbed patient, disturbing therapy by St. Cloud psychologist | StarTribune.com =-.

Then again, I don’t think the accommodations being useless for CA students would stop it. Case in point: all the whinging about Ritalin and “drugging children into compliance when it’s the parents’ fault for not raising them properly” and all that stuff – when, you know, Ritalin only works the way it’s meant to if you have AD(H)D. But we couldn’t have facts getting into the way here, oh no.

Also, I want to say – I understand what you mean by “good cripples vs. bad cripples” and I’ve had my fair share of brushes with the “but disabled people look like X, and you don’t!”/”but Y isn’t a *real* disability!”, but I am a bit worried by putting it into those terms because it seems as if it could easily dismiss the ableism people with more “classical” disabilities get subjected to. In particular, the way it’s phrased makes it seem as if blind people, d/Deaf people, people in wheelchairs, etc. would never have a professor deny them accommodations they needed, which I find a somewhat problematic assumption.
.-= Kaz´s last blog ..You are now looking at an Officially Official Aspie (TM) =-.

I think it’s because people confuse “equally” with “the same”. Treating students with disabilities equally to other students would allow things like extra time on exams, and acknowledge different ways of learning without placing value judgments on them.

And, of course, this gets into the heirarchy of disability. I suspect none of these people who are quite up in arms about it would be complaining about giving my husband accommodations, since he’s a wheelchair user and thus “really” disabled. So, things like having a note-taker, a scribe for exams, and making sure that everything was wheelchair accessible wasn’t “unethical”.

Blind people, Deaf people, People with wheelchairs or arm-crutches and the like? They’re the “good” cripples. But obviously people with mental health conditions or who are non-neurotypical are faking. And if it’s over-diagnosed (and it must be, right? Right?) the best way to deal with that is by punishing the student in front of you, who had to jump through countless hoops to get the paperwork for disability-related accommodations.

“When we make special accommodations for individuals by changing our teaching style in a fashion which is to the detriment of the group as a whole, we are displaying favouritism. How is this anything but unethical? Similarly, when we extend accommodations to individuals which may not be to the detriment of the group, but *would* be to their benefit if made available, the playing field is no longer level, and yet transcripts will show no evidence of this fact. Again, surely this is unethical?”

http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/2009/10/this-weeks-early-thirsty-on-disabled.html

It’s unethical to make sure that I don’t fail for reasons beyond my control? What?
.-= Kaitlyn´s last blog ..Spoon Theory and Me (It’s all about me) =-.

I am having a terrible week. I have left a class early and skipped another one, so I could go to another one.

Now I have a presentation to work on.

Except I put it off because it is quite easy, and last night, I thought I could push through whatever piddly problems I would have tonight and get it done.

I can’t.

I have every right to e-mail my professor, to ask for help, to miss more classes than “allowed” but I hate doing it almost as much as I hate the pain. These attitudes don’t help, though my professors have been quite nice so far.
.-= Kaitlyn´s last blog ..Spoon Theory and Me (It’s all about me) =-.

I thought people in academia were supposed to be enlightened.
.-= thetroubleis´s last blog ..What It Is To Be A Monster =-.