#ableism in schools

[notebeans-galaxy]

you wanna know something? I was extremely ambitious as a child. I've wanted to be an engineer and an astrophysicist since before I learned long division. I wanted to be a writer by the time I was 9, and I wanted to be a singer by the time I was 11.

That ambition decreased in middle & high school, but it never fully went away; I decided I also wanted to be a visual artist and a programmer and a polyglot and an activist. On the more casual side I want to study genetics, pharmacology, voice acting, literature, linguistics, anthropology, the occult, & religious history.

I was a straight A student in elementary school. I wasn't just a straight A student, I was a dedicated nerd; I genuinely enjoyed school despite severe social ostracization and I thought most of my homework was interesting enough that I wasn't bored while doing it.

And somehow, despite that, despite that I've always been ambitious and always sought challenge and that I was competitive to a fault, I somehow managed to convince myself I was lazy in middle and high school when my grades dropped due to severe unaddressed childhood trauma causing mental health issues, my ADHD medication losing effectiveness from being on it for a decade, and multiple undiagnosed chronic illnesses. I never actually stopped trying. I'd just convinced myself that because I couldn't complete classwork with the same attention I used to, that because I was stressed and exhausted and had to rest more often, that it was somehow my fault that my grades got worse. No, I'm fucking disabled. No one ever bothered to tell me that ADHD was a disability until I was in high school, no one but me realized I was depressed or autistic until I asked for diagnoses, no one ever took the severity of my chronic fatigue or post-exertional malaise or orthostatic intolerance seriously enough. fuck the way estrogen interacts with dysautonomia y'all it's so bad, testosterone HRT was more effective treatment for it than anything else. i still need salt tablets but my POTS is stable now entirely because of T.

I think the real kicker is that all it took was a bus to my house for me to attend school again. The barriers to success for disabled students often have such simple solutions and yet no one's willing to implement them until forced to. I was convinced for years that it was my own failures & incompetence that were the issue, and all it took was not being forced to walk.

I'm going to start college in the fall and I know it's possible for me to achieve some of the things I've had my sights set on since I was a kid. I still have chronic fatigue and chronic pain and non-24 complicates scheduling, but calculus is a hell of a lot easier when you aren't suffering 3+ types of cognitive impairment simultaneously. side note why is calculus Like That I can do physics related calculus because i learned integrals and derivatives before literally anything else because i was taking AP Physics: Mechanics concurrently with Calc AB during my first attempt at 12th grade, but i struggle to comprehend the rest of it.

A few years ago, I'd resigned myself to not being able to pursue my interests. I figured I wouldn't be able to succeed in anything I tried due to how ill I was. And while I still may not be able to study all of the things I'm interested in at a college, I sure as hell can pursue the most important ones — the original four things I wanted to do with my life. Writing and music can easily remain hobbies; I don't need those to be part of my career to feel fulfilled in them. I'm planning to study cosmology in the distant future (from what I understand, you need a Ph.D to even get started) and I'll be basing my class choices around that; underclassmen all have undeclared majors at my college, but as of now I'm planning to frame my schedule around pursuit of a physics degree (which is also easily transferrable to engineering!). Crushing college debt, here I come — but it's worth it to study astronomy, physics, & cosmology.

All it took was a bus. All it took for me to graduate high school was a bus.

[sweaters-and-vertigo]

so like.. when teachers and professors decide they’re not going to accept late work, do they even care about the mentally ill and/or disabled students in their classes?

[arctic-hands]

No but seriously the United States desperately needs to have a discussion about segregation against the disabled in our school systems and we can start with how anti-masking and perfect attendance policies have forced medically vulnerable kids to either put themselves at grievous risk or pull out of school all together

[spooniestrong]

[classicslesbianopinions]

the other thing about being disabled in academia is everyone is like "yeah we can't do much about the buildings they're old :/" as if "old" being a synonym for "inaccessible" isn't just a constant reminder that the people who built the school did not imagine that someday someone like me might study there

[mxmorbidmidnight]

You know those teachers who would have posters in their classrooms like “weird is a superpower” and “in a world where you can be anything, be kind” then would proceed to scream at a neurodivergent child until they cried.

[prokopetz]

I think a lot of the skepticism and derision toward the idea of "gifted kid burnout" stems from the fact that a lot of folks have no idea what the gifted track in most high schools actually looks like; they've got this mental image, possibly informed by popular media depictions, of "gifted kids" as a privileged group of students who get to go on extra field trips, monopolise the teachers' attention in class, and constantly be told how special they are, but who are otherwise treated identically to all the other kids.

In practice, the gifted track in most high schools – most North American high schools, at any rate – has the same problem as any other educational program: the need to adhere to published metrics. These programs exist for the benefit of students only insofar as those benefits can empirically be measured, which leads to several common outcomes:

Students on the gifted track being afforded fewer choices regarding elective classes – often to the extent of having no choices at all – in order to stream the highest-performing students into the subjects that are most valuable in terms of boosting institutional metrics.

Students on the gifted tracking receiving restricted access to educational resources such as tutoring because it's perceived as a waste of funding. In many cases, gifted students are not only denied access to tutoring, but expected to serve as volunteer tutors and teaching assistants themselves, effectively becoming a source of unpaid educational labour for the schools they attend.

Students on the gifted track being assigned considerably more homework, often literally doubling their workload in an environment where homework loads are already routinely high enough that kids have difficulty finding time to eat and sleep, simply because you get more measurable academic performance data that way.

The upshot is that the gifted track is often less about fun perks and constant praise, and more about receiving less freedom, fewer resources, and heavier workloads than one's peers, getting strong-armed into providing unpaid labour to the school on top of it, and constantly being told one should be grateful for it – and that's without touching on the fact that the unspoken secondary purpose of many gifted programs is to serve as a quarantine for all the neurodivergent kids the school couldn't find an excuse to institutionalise or expel.

Like, shit, there's a reason kids on the gifted track exhibit elevated rates of alcoholism and substance abuse compared to general student populations. That doesn't arise in a vacuum!

(To be clear, I'm not saying that people graduating from high school and immediately having an existential crisis upon realising they're not special after all isn't a thing that happens, but in my experience that's more usually something that happens to the kids who were on the football team, and reframing it as a nerd culture thing is really weird.)

[starfishinthedistance]

Shoutout to neurodivergents who were punished or marked down in assignments for using too complex language, and also shoutout to neurodivergents who were punished or marked down in assignments for using too simple language, and also shout out to neurodivergents who were punished for both of these depending on the most recent way they fucked up

[t4transsexual]

15 year old google psychologist on tiktok: you HAVE to be PROFESSIONALLY DIAGNOSED WITH AUTISM or else youre a FAKER whos STEALING RESOURCES from ACTUAL PEOPLE WITH AUTISM

psychiatrist: you dont act autistic. ok well i guess you acted autistic as a kid but not now so clearly something changed. whats masking?

psychiatrist: you experience a lot of traits of autism but you made eye contact with me for a bit so you cant be autistic

psychiatrist: you cant be autistic because youre too smart

psychiatrist: well you experience profound symptoms of autism but your brothers already diagnosed with autism and thats not possible for you both to be

psychiatrist: ok you seem autistic however youre a teenage girl. have you considered you might have borderline personality disorder/bipolar disorder instead?

*also when you get diagnosed*

psychiatrist: i cant advocate for your disabling ptsd to the government, i can only do autism. yes i know your autism isnt the actual problem here but have you considered that youre just being autistic about it?

psychiatrist: i cant write a letter of recommendation for gender affirming care because youre autistic. yes i know you work a full time job and live independently but youre not capable of making these decisions

psychiatrist: *doesnt try to treat/talk about anything but the autism*

the 15 year old again: i know you SAID youre diagnosed with autism but i dont believe you because anyone can say that, so im going to continue to harrass you about it anyway

[q8qwertyuiop8p]

If you want to ship Jinx with someone, that's fine. But I'm so tired of people getting upset when people don't think she could be in a relationship, and then trying to make a scene about it, calling those people abliest and bigoted.

I myself suffer from mental illnesses, two of which Jinx also experiences. The truth is, yes, there are people who are too mentally ill to maintain a healthy relationship. They are the minority of the mentally ill, but they exist. There are also many people who don't want that kind of relationship for reasons relating with their mental illness.

Jinx is mentally stunted and still acts like a child. She suffers from visual and auditory hallucinations to the point that she has difficulty distinguishing between psychosis and reality. She has severe PTSD due to the loss of those close to her and betrayal. She suffers paranoia, especially regarding what people's true motivations are, and irrationally assumes that everyone is out to get her. She is an unstable murderer with a severe lack of empathy and value for life, including her own.

Reality isn't always pleasant, and the reality is that, assuming they even want that kind of relationship in the first place, someone like jinx can not maintain a healthy relationship without serious help (which doesn't seem to be available in Zaun), and you are kidding yourself if you think otherwise. That doesn't mean it is wrong to ship her by any means. But acknowledging this reality is NOT abliest so long as you aren't generalizing that all mentally ill people don't want or can't have this type of relationship.

If you are making it out to be abliest, YOU are the problem, because you are either making assumptions, overthinking it, or purposely trying to cause turmoil. When you frame things that aren't abliest as abliest, you are making it difficult for actual victims and cases of ableism to be taken seriously. I understand you may think you are doing the right thing, but before you throw around those labels, please take the time to consider how something is problematic and if you are jumping to conclusions.

[disjournaled-scrolls]

Yesterday, when I was sleeping during a study hall at school, some kids I kind of knew (who KNEW I have a disability) took my cane and started swinging it around, using it like a bat, and playing with it. People assumed I'd given it to them, because when asked to stop, they said no and continued. By the time someone woke me up and told me, they had broken the wrist strap and were pulling apart the pole to stretch the folding elastic. They did not say sorry. They did not take responsibility. They simply gave it back after saying "look, did you know it could do this?" and stretching the elastic again. My friends reprimanded them, but now the wrist strap connection is broken and keeps falling off my wrist, putting me in danger.

The day before this happened, they had asked to hold the cane, and I said no.

Stop feeling entitled to touch people's medical aids. Stop acting like they're not really necessary or important. Stop fucking breaking our shit.

[edlucavalden]

I love kabumisu, but yall focus on mithrun's development too much. What about kabru. What about the things mithrun helps kabru with. What about the things kabru realizes about himself through his interactions with mithrun. He people pleases so hard he accidentally starts thinking about himself, that's such a funny concept. why aren't there more pieces around it.

[uncanny-tranny]

I'm going to preface this by saying that I have really complex feelings about this, and much of it is inspired by my personal experiences and a bit of learning about what other trans people experience. If I come across as messy, it is because of these reasons.

There's this unshakable feeling I have that when allies and even other trans people talk about trans people, transition and motivation for transition, and anything related to such, that there's only certain things that x type of trans person can (and should) experience and talk about.

Like, when people talk about FtMs/trans men/transmasc people, a common idea is that we're motivated to transition to game the system, to manipulate people into treating us better because we're now seen as men. A huge reason I never even bought into that idea is because, since transition (especially medical), I have been treated worse than I ever have been. Since transitioning and being on testosterone, I've been catcalled, had people insist I hand my number over, and I have to emphasize that I've never experienced these things until a couple of years ago (to clarify, this was in my real, corporeal life). I honestly can say that, while transition has saved my life and soul, I am treated worse by others than I ever had been pre-transition. However, because the idea of transmascs is that "they were victims of misogyny and they only want to escape it through transition" is popular even among some trans people, I feel like it's almost... taking something away by acknowledging that. Add to this that I'm white and that TPoC have so many experiences that intertwine with race, and that race absolutely goes into how trans people are treated.

I am not saying that my experience is the only valid or true one. I am very aware that I'm probably an outlier. However, I just notice that, time and time again, people hear what they want to hear about transness, and if people have even slightly different points of view from their experiences, it doesn't matter, or worse, those people are duplicitous and conniving.