Important notice from the GRAMMAR POLICE. Plz read. This means you.
Zazazu:
Quote from: rufio on 2009 June 17, 02:59:57
To clarify my earlier assumptions that it was a high school - I made that assumption because I didn't realize there was any fucking way that something like this could happen in an actual college. If it's true, I am as appalled as you are. My best guess (given what you've told me) is that they simply want her tuition money, and they don't get it if they let her fail. So they sell her a diploma that isn't worth the paper it's printed on. Capitalism at its best. ::)
A suitemate of mine my sophomore year was a similar situation. She had some sort of emotional disability, developmental delay I'd guess, and the critical thinking of a 6. She was a freshman and I couldn't believe that she'd been admitted to my college, which was sub-ivy but private, quite expensive, and difficult to get into. Come to find out, she was the daughter of a major donor. She had tutoring, summer sessions, an aide in class...and for what? What would her joke of an education get her that daddy's money wouldn't play a bigger part in?
In high school, my school moved towards inclusion. I wasn't in gifted talented at the time because I was sick of not being with some of my friends and I didn't see the point to AP. Well, except for Bio & Physics. The inclusion students had a wide range of disabilities and really most of them weren't any sort of problem. There were two, though, who I dreaded having in class because they would ask so many questions and we'd waste so much time in class going over the same thing twenty times for them. It was boring and aggravating, and didn't exactly move me to want to interact with them socially.
rohina:
Quote from: professorbutters on 2009 June 17, 04:42:07
I'd want to be very careful before I ruled an entire field of knowledge off-limits to everyone with a certain disability.
To clarify: I was thinking of a student who was very, very blind (not just legally blind), writing those essays where you analyse the composition and details in a given painting.
My point is that I do feel like there is a resistance to telling disabled students that they suck at stuff, which is still something "normal" students will get from time to time. I don't see it as purely negative, either; it's life advice, like I was given when I was kind of caving to parental pressure to do Law, and someone (a mentor) said "you are going to be really bad at it and end up hating it, and these are the reasons why." That was, in some ways, a difficult conversation, but I appreciated it. If we are prevented from having those kinds of conversations with people with disabilities, is that really a good thing?
professorbutters:
Quote from: rohina on 2009 June 17, 05:31:19
Quote from: professorbutters on 2009 June 17, 04:42:07
I'd want to be very careful before I ruled an entire field of knowledge off-limits to everyone with a certain disability.
To clarify: I was thinking of a student who was very, very blind (not just legally blind), writing those essays where you analyse the composition and details in a given painting.
My point is that I do feel like there is a resistance to telling disabled students that they suck at stuff, which is still something "normal" students will get from time to time. I don't see it as purely negative, either; it's life advice, like I was given when I was kind of caving to parental pressure to do Law, and someone (a mentor) said "you are going to be really bad at it and end up hating it, and these are the reasons why." That was, in some ways, a difficult conversation, but I appreciated it. If we are prevented from having those kinds of conversations with people with disabilities, is that really a good thing?
I think there's a subtle difference. For example: it's very nice for lots of people to study music. Very, very few ought to be encouraged to pursue it as a profession. I didn't enjoy it when a voice teacher opined that I would not ever develop the voice to sing opera. It may even have been true that my "real" voice wasn't going to come in until much later (she said this when I was twenty, and darker voices do develop late.) I still think it wasn't bad for her to say that, because it forced me to re-evaluate, and ultimately, I don't have the right temperament for it. A real future opera singer would have said "So? I SPIT me of your opinion." I wasn't disabled. I just didn't have a truly magnificent voice, and it's really stupid to try to be an opera singer without a truly magnificent voice. And no one really wants to say to anyone, "um, your voice? Nice. Not great."
Someone who truly wants to do something extraordinary is going to move heaven and earth to do it. Someone in a wheelchair who wants to do ballet will sneer at obstacles and work without sleep for a decade until she has put together the Wheelchairinas and the media is doing breathless stories about it. That's not anything like watering a discipline down.
J. M. Pescado:
I am having difficulty picturing La Butt as a lawyer.
rosess:
Quote from: professorbutters on 2009 June 17, 04:42:07
Wouldn't that depend upon what kind of blindness your student had, and how profoundly blind he or she was, and why he or she wanted to take Art History? There are blind artists. I even recently heard of an exhibition entirely made up of the work of blind photographers. Most of these people were "legally blind": they could still see, but needed a lot of help. In fact, one said that he used a camera as a sight aide: he took photographs of things and *then* he could see them. Blindness and Arts
I'd want to be very careful before I ruled an entire field of knowledge off-limits to everyone with a certain disability.
Part of my job was once to make musical performances relevant for deaf students. It's actually rather fascinating to pull apart all the facets of music other than the actual tonal experience and see that it's still an interesting subject. We went into visual representations of rhythm, experiencing the effect of sound waves by holding a balloon, demonstrating the mathematical relationships between notes with vibrating rubber bands, etc. I'm not quite sure the bureaucracy was as helpful... having to hire a sign-language interpreter for a 100% musical performance is just a fancy way to give the translator's arms a rest and create a ton of questions about why that person sitting on the edge of the stage never did anything.
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