Well 1997 is preparing to sneak out and 1998 is preparing to slip in. As people prepare for tomorrow’s morning-after-the-night-before exhaustion and a marathon of watching college football after a revelrous night and morning of all that ushering in and ringing out dancing to the tune of the Times Square Rag, I was thinking about a young lady I’ll call Margie who gave me permission to tell her story.

She was a student in class last year. I use the term “student” very loosely. She was physically in classroom–on occasion–but never in the class or into the class. When she was present I never knew whether she would be hungover or flying high. I knew she certainly would not be prepared. Her graphic journal entries of arguments with her uninvolved father who “pays me off with checks for school”, cursing paragraphs–by her description–of both her mother “who cares more for her bottle than me” and a threatening stepfather who “cares more for the dog because I’m not ‘his blood,'” daily partying, sexual escapades, drinking binges, and smoking and sniffing, taken singularly and collectively would have made Poe’s blood curdle and brought down the house of Usher on the first page. It was if she was deliberately rubbing my nose–maybe other’s as well–in her excesses. She seldom worked with the other members of her quadrad though they struggled to include her. Oh, how they struggled, but to no avail. When I rose to her baited antics and entries, it would be as if she dematerialized in front of me so my words would just pass through some apparition without touching anything. Other times it was as if she closed an inner eye lid and didn’t have to see me. Still other times, she would roll her eyes and take a blase “here comes some more of the sermonizing crap” stance or tighten into a “I’ve gotten this from my #)($*(&^# ‘loving’ father, mother, and stepfather and I don’t need it from you” strut. There was no reaching her; there was no touching her. Each time, countless times, I extended a helping hand, she would slap it away. At the end of the quarter she was in my office crying hysterically that the “‘F’ you gave me is going to ruin my life.” She screamed that her “$)%(*##&” father was going to cut off her money, her “@#)(&&#$@” stepfather was going to pull her out of school and put her to work, her “)$(%$A^&^#” boyfriend was going to walk out on her, her “#@#)(%*%^# mother” was just going to drink and watch “if she can see straight” and “it’s all your fault.” She ripped her journal out of the box and angrily rushed out.

I called her “my pillar of hell.” That was over a year ago. I never saw her again and never heard from her. Hadn’t really thought about her–until last week when out of the blue I received an e-mail message from Margie wishing me a happy Chanukah. The message reminded me that “hell” in German means “bright.”

Margie told me that none of her forboding predications had come to pass as she knew they wouldn’t and “at the same time they had”. All, “my unloved ones,” as Margie said, “forgave me and didn’t do a thing to me because they didn’t give a damn about me. They only cared about themselves. They just didn’t want to feel guilty.” She said I was the only one who ever cared enough to see through her and hold my ground, and “it’s a mystery to me why I couldn’t stop wondering why.” She didn’t understand why she kept her journal as if it was something holy. What was equally inexplicable to her was how, after she left Valdosta, she would go to her journal after coming out from a stupor and read one of the daily “habits of the heart” I would write on the board and we would discuss for a few minutes at the beginning of class. “I kept asking myself, ‘Why am I doing this?’ But, I couldn’t stop thinking about how you asked why did I write down those words if I was so down on myself and thought they were a bunch of hokey bull shit. I wondered about that a lot, more and more, about how you asked me if I trying to say something to myself.”

She told me, “Do you realize you never gave me advice, not told me what to do, just asked me a bunch of frightening questions. Well, I’ve started answering them for myself…..I’ve taken some big steps in the last few months.” She moved out of her parents’ house, got her own apartment, told her father to keep “his conscience money,” left her boyfriend, got a job, and enrolled in a local community college, and is going for help. ” She said she remembered–and so do I–her shouting, “why are you doing this to me.” She remembered me calmly telling her that she did it to herself and asked if she realized there are always consequences. She remembered me saying that if I did anything else it would be a sign that I didn’t care. She remembered me saying–I don’t–“I did it because of the love I have for you as a person. She remembered her screaming back, “Don’t love me. I don’t need it. I need the ‘A’ to live.”

“Well,” Margie went on, “I was wrong. I didn’t need the grade. I needed the love and faith. I see it now. I guess I just needed to believe that someone believed I was worth believing in so I could take a chance of believing in myself.” Margie ended her message with “I want you to know that you played a large role to help me start helping myself whether you know it or not. You’re always with me. I first you were a pain in the ass. Now you’re healing of my soul….I’m going to recover and decided to dry up inside me and light up that fire inside me you always said I was throwing water on.”

What an unexpected Chanukah present.

I briefly tell you Margie’s story because I believe in each student and tell you this story of why I believe each student is a human treasure of this country, of the world, for the future; and how I hope this and other stories will broaden and raise people’s view of students.

Margie convinces me that in the soul of every student burns a fire. Yet, so many can’t or won’t go inside to warm themselves at it. It is so easy to be one of those uninvolved passerbys who sees only sooty smoke lazily drifting skyward to pollute the air and settles to blacken the scenery. But, I believe that while that unattended fire may burn low, the flames may flicker, the hearth may be a tad cold, the fire is never extinguished. With some tender stoking, some persistent waving with a sheet of paper, some bending over on your hands and knees, some deep breaths and puffing cheeks and blowing, its embers just may be fanned into a roaring blaze. You won’t know until you’ve blacken your hands, stuck your the nose close to the glowing ashes, reddened your face, and gotten a little dizzy.

Because of Margie, if I was in the resolution-making business, I would resolve that to make 1998 a “you ain’t seen nothing yet” year and to make 1997 a “if you thought it was something” year, I would contribute to global warming. Sound anti-environmental. It’s not. I’m not talking about the fires of burning fossil fuel. I’m talking about the one thing this year that has nothing to do with El Nino. I’m talking about igniting the fires of the heart.

I would resolve to resist the tidal pull of everyday life, not get out of this season’s feeling, and stay in my faith in the students. I would resolve now that I’m back from break I don’t break with my faith in students, now that the vacation is over I don’t let my belief in students go on vacation. I would resolve while I file into the classroom, I don’t file away this feeling after reading Margie’s message under the “proper holiday.” I would resolve to understand and not forget that I don’t have to go to national parks to see this land’s natural beauty; it’s before me in the classroom where the sun rises on wonders great and small. I would resolve that I keep getting my faith in students up and out, strike it as a match to help students see they have their own matches in the pockets of their soul, and use it to help students kindle their own fire and brighten their glow.

When that happens, I can stand up, hold out my hands to the fire, and feel myself warmed knowing that the world burns a bit brighter and warmer. That kind of global warming we all can stand.

Make it a good day and a blessed new year.

–Louis–

Well, five more days to New Year’s Eve. We’re at that time when everyone is recapping the past year with the best, worst, least, and most. So, who am I to argue. Feeling like Janus with one facing looking forward and the other backward, as I wonder about what is to come in the coming year, what have I learned in what is about to become last year:

Through my ups and downs, successes and failures, gains and losses of this seismic year, this is some of what I have learned. And if they are not new lessons, I’ve learned more about old ones:

In the scheme of things maybe it is less important to impart information than it is to offer students opportunities to learn how to discover on their own. I truly believe that the more I empower students, the more I empower myself; when I control someone, I am restricting myself. The more I struggle to control the classroom, the less faith I have in students and myself; if I truly trust them, I will help them to learn how to educate themselves. Otherwise, I’ll only have trained and schooled them in dependency; As the chinese proverb says, don’t give a man a fish to eat for one day. Teach him how to fish so he will eat all his life. That is not a “dumbing down” or “watering down;” it’s just taking out an academic triptik and finding another scenic, enjoyable, meaningful route to reach my destination.

What I do each day in classroom is determined by who is in the classroom. I, therefore, must struggle harder than ever to know who is in the classroom. By “who,” I just do not mean the students.

It’s not enough to transmit information. It’s also our responsibility to see that such information is used well. Information and knowledge is of no value, if values are not learned; and, the character of the application of such information and knowledge rests in the character of the person. No, if I only focus on today’s class and only on the subject material, I am shirking my responsibilty to tomorrow.

Teaching is not a on lower rung than scholarship, nor is to be a teacher something lesser than being a scholarly professor. If I consider teaching beneath me, of lesser value, I will not find it valuable enough to rise to the occasion and do it well. No one can make me feel a lesser person for being a teacher or make me believe I am doing something lesser by focusing on my teaching without my consent. I have to let my teaching be led by me, not by others

If I believe the absurdities or abberations told about the students or dwell on the extremes of the good and bad, I will find it harder to commit myself to each student and easier to do harm by ignoring them. A student uneducated or miseducated, is a person tossed away and lost. The way to value and love each student is to realize that very horror can happen so easily.

If I display a disdainful attitude towards students, I am not displaying a misuse and abuse power, control, and authority. I think I am revealing weakness and fear and insecurity and perhaps inner hurt, as well as a disdain for what I do and for myself.

Students may act ignorant, but they are not in a state of ignorance; their spirit is not stained by original ignorance.

I’ve come to the frightening and humbling conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. As the teacher, as the role model, it’s me, my moods, my personal approach, my beliefs about myself and each student that makes the classroom’s weather warm or cold, that makes the air polluted or clean. It is awesome to think of the moral authority I as a teacher possess, how I can be a humiliating or uplifing, sour or humorous, hurtful or healing force. It all depends upon whether I dominate, recognize, humilitate, respect, hurt, care, notice, ignore, love, reject, accept; and that I am so not just with my words, but with my eyes, face, lips, vocal tones, body. I have to be conscious of and sensitive to the fact I possess a tremendous power to make a student’s life miserable or joyous, suffering or enjoyable. I can turn the lights up the classroom or throw the classroom into darkenss. I can make the classroom as bland and sterile as an operating room or as exciting and enchanting as a Martha Stewart room; I can be a thumb-screw or a rack and make the classroom into a torture chamber or I can be a singing violin and make the classroom an inspiring orchestral hall; I can make the classroom into an imprisioning dungeon or a releasing cathedral. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a student will be humanized or de-humanized.

A student is never simple; nor am I.

Complaining about students is such a waste of time and energy. I can’t use it as a foundation upon which to build. It’s only a mudhole in which to wallow, a quagmire in which to sink.

Each class, which may seem ostensibly the same–the title of the course is the same, the room number is the same–is, in fact, quite different from any other. I should always be walking into the unknown as I realize the people inside are different not only from those in another class which might be listed under the same title, but are different from one another. And when I walk into that class the next day, it is different and the people are different from the one and the ones that I left the previous day. Nothing is ever the same. Every day of every term of every year, then, should be a day of wonder and wonderment; it should be count down time; it should be a special first day; it should be gearing up for a new game, a new challenge, a new venture, a new adventure, a new unfamiliarity, a new excitement, and a new unknown. When the butterflies are not aflutterin’, when I’m not on the edge; when I am not on edge wondering if I can still pull it off, I’ve lost my edge. I’ve dulled and it’s time to quit.

What is important about students is not visible except to the heart.

So many of us want to work in a risk-free, mistake-free environment. But, I tell the students that if they are afraid to fail, they will not strive to succeed. And so it must be with me. If I never make a mistake in what I do then I have not challenged myself to grow, develop, change. It is entirely too easy to take the safe way out, to do what I know what will work. But if I do this, I will soon find out it will not always work, for as each student is different and so is each gathering of students. If I am afraid to take a risk, then I will never have the opportunity to find out what I can do for both each student and myself. We can get so doggone cluttered up trying to be perfect.

There is no greater joy than giving to worthy causes. I can’t think of a worthier cause than a student. I can’t think of doing anything more beautiful for life and the future.

I have found that familiarity and the expected can subltly inflict a paralysis of the body, a stifling of the spirit, and a deadening of the soul. How do you say something new about that which is all-too-familiar; how do you do something new with that which you do routinely; how do you see something new in which you see the expected; how to you get excited about something that is old hat? No, teaching each day should be like the birth of a new unfamiliar child, the taking of an unfamiliar route, the unexpected sights of unknown scenery. It’s the unfamiliar and unexpected that innoculates me from the ravages of getting flacid, dull, stale, old; it’s the unfamiliar and unexpected that keeps me fresh, alert, excited, and alive.

Above all, I’ve learned that all of these lessons are first of all an affiar of the heart, not simply a matter of behaviour modification. As any AA member will tell you, the core of change is emotional. It’s primarily spiritual because we are a spiritual being, not intellectually driven. When people tell their stories, whether they are conscious of it or not, whether they admit it or not, they always start with the heart story, not the mind story. There is room for partnership of the heart in academic life, for academic life is not divorce from life. This partnership is a necessity if we are to be truly educated and to truly educate. But as the heart struggles to change, we have to understand the depths of that struggle; we have to welcome that struggle; we have to offer support and encouragement; we have to provide community and comfort; we have to provide remedial training and education.

Now that I look back on what I have learned this past year, none of them are lessons in ease or safty or comfort, but they are wondrous instructions in personal growth, reward, fulfillment, meaningfulness, joy, and beauty. And if I have truly learned these lessons, the year that was will continue to be.

What have you learned during this year?

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

Here it is 3:45 a.m. My neighbor’s buglar alarm just went off. Now that I’ve climbed down from the ceiling, I’m not sleepy. I can’t complain, I’ve set ours off more than once lately when I’ve let the dog out or gone for the newspaper and forgotten to turn the blasted thing off. I guess it’s payback time. Can’t go for a walk. Haven’t walked in a while. My Susan won’t let me. She’s making such a big thing about my pinky toe, or whatever they call it, that I cracked when I stubbed it a few weeks ago even though it doesn’t hurt when I tape it to the adjacent toe. She not convinced, and you don’t mess with the “Momma.” Anyway, here I am with a hot cup of freshly brewed coffee at my side. The Internet is quiet. It’s that time of the year when people are stuck in road or airline traffic rather than in the traffic of the information superhighway. For some reason I’ve start thinking about my good friend, Bill Hayes, who has a website on which he puts and invites others to put “Ten Big Issues” of their discipline. Little things about teachers and teaching are suddenly dancing and prancing and spinning around in my head and heart like this season’s sugar plum fairies and dredels. They’re probably little wisps drifting up from the embers of a hot and heavy discussion a bunch of us were involved in last week on one particular list. I think I’ll just jot them down as they seem to be coming:

1. Students have one thing in common. They’re all different;

2. I don’t think making a mistake in class is fatal, but worrying about making a mistake and what others think is;

3. “they won’t let me” or something like that is usually what educational tyranny and slavery are made of: you know where you want to go and and what to do, but you won’t let yourself get up and go and make a todo;

4. A teacher is not a person for a student to lean on but a person who makes leaning unnecessary;

5. if all we do is count student faults, things never will add up right to make us seem right;

6. the two biggest obstacle we teachers face is have to do with us, not the students: believing there are new things about teaching to learn and having to unlearn the old ones;

7. we so often fashion our educational wardrobe to be fashionable with those around us; but if we all do that, who is the designer?

8. tell me, if you choose to hike a new path, why should you not expect to chance a stumble over a rock or get muddied in a puddle or come upon unexpected twist and a turn. Is it any different in the classroom?

9. I think supposed problem children are opportunites; you just have to get out of your suit or dress and into your workclothes

10. I wonder if a teacher who says of a student, “he doesn’t belong” or “she can’t…” or “he won’t” is really looking in a mirror

10. when helping a student, I’d rather call upon my conscience than think about my reputation. The former is about me, the latter about others.

11. We teachers, like students, must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves in our teaching; otherwise we lose our dexterity and harden.

12. When a teacher is wrapped up in him/herself, in only what he or she does, it is a lously looking and poorly wrapped package.

13. I think teaching is like the sun in the sky; it’s in constant motion creating a warm, nourshing, and nurturing light for things to grow into what they are capable of becoming

14. A teacher who is afraid to make a mistake usually doesn’t create anything.

15. What we model for children in the classroom, they will take with them into adulthood and out into society.

16. I am a gardner; I want to be in the classroom like a perennial plant in my garden; I want to blossom year after year after; I want each student to emerge from the classroom as a perennial plant to bloom year after year after year, not just on a test.

17. No great achievement in the classroom is accomplished suddenly; a miracle occurs with a lot of hard work and taking risks

18. Show me someone who never takes a risk in the classroom, and I will show you someone not really interested in either themselves or the students

19. if we enter a classroom with jaundiced eyes everything looks miscolored; if we enter with clear eyes, everything looks bright

20. You know, I savor a good wine. But, I don’t look at the bottle to find it.

21. Succssful teaching is not a gift; it’s an accomplishment

22. Innovation and risk-taking are inevitably controversial and people so often defensively denouce it as deviant from the accepted norm

23. I think too often we teachers unthinkingly try to make our students replicas of ourselves and too often think that students learn best the way we learn best

24. I want to be a visionary whose vision I can shake hands with.

There’s more inside, but that’s enough for now. It’s more that Bill’s required ten. I suppose I could compress them into Bill’s required ten, but I don’t feel like it.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

You wouldn’t believe–well, some of you would–how warm it’s on my computer. I am getting flamed off-list in napalm proportions from denying faculty for being tiresome, hysterical, exaggerating, simplistic, melodramatic, insulting, naive, arrogant, uninformed, self-righteous, etc

Then, I got a message from a graduate student that showed just how shriveled some of these people with bloated egos regretably are, how the joints in their spirit have calloused. I think you should read it. I warn you, however, your heart will ache; it will be hard to breathe, your legs with numb, your nails with dig into your palms, and your eyes will fill with water. It is a message of suffering, endurance, persecution, courage, torture, hope, descreation, and promise. The student gave me permission to share the message if I thought I should. I do. To honor the student’s request for anonymity, I have expunged any reference which might in the slightest way indicate the student’s school and discipline.

This student reminds me why I want to be a visionary with a vision I can shake hands with. I do so wish I could humbly stand in the light of this student’s nobility, shake this student’s hand, and send him/her a bag of Tootsie Pops:

As a PhD student who is dyslexic I appreciated your post. I have experienced mostly hate and abuse from my …….. faculty

I am not longer at the first institution that admitted me (one of the top programs in the country). I spent 4 years there living through hell, was emotionally and intellectually battered and abused by faculty …..I was told “if you can’t spell it you don’t know it” (I am dyslexic – there are four kinds of dyslexia). I have been asked how I did so well on the entrance exam if I was “retarded” (93 percentile unaccommodated) . My response was “people with learning disabilities have to be twice as smart as everyone else just to break even.”. Had I chosen to have accommodations on the [test] I would probably have done even better. At the time I decided that the red flag of nonstandard test administration was more problematic than the lower [test] score.

My accommodations generally are more time and access to a computer and it’s spell checker. When spell checking, approximately 1/4 to 1/3 of a page is flagged of which the spell checker has no suggestions for about 1/3 of those works. Spell checking my recent essay final took an hour (at the previous place the faculty in my dept. told that my exams should be better than the other students since I had more time!)…..Perhaps if these faculty….treated students as human beings with feelings, hopes, fears instead of inconvenient, time consuming, defective nuisances they might begin to realize that those of us who have struggled, for example just to learn to read,and have made it to grad school against all odds, have more to contribute than they might expect. Would they like their loved ones treated as they appear to treat some of their students?

I used to speak to disabled high school students about going to college. I’d tell them that we have one advantage over people without disabilities. When we fail we are used to picking ourselves up and going on, trying again. We are used to having our integrity, intelligence, motivation, etc. questioned by rude, insensitive individuals; having comments made to us that would never be made to a student without disabilities. As result we have learned to cope, although we may be just as hurt or destroyed by this behavior as anyone else, we know that this juvenile behavior on the part of some faculty says more about them than it does about us. We cry in private. We are used to having to advocate for ourselves, having to prove ourselves. The hazing that some faculty give new PhD students is nothing new. We have had to live with that our whole lives. It doesn’t make it any less painful, but we have an advantage in that we have learned how to go on in the face of people rooting for us to fail and gloating when we do. We have learned how to hang on to our self worth despite the batterings. We have learned not to give up easily. This is not making lemonade out of lemons, this is dealing with the hard facts of life. To get to where we are today (ie in college or grad school), we have already had to run a gantlet, without much support, and far fewer have survived than should. Treat every student like I have been treated and there would be a student shortage crisis in higher education. Treat every student how I have been treated and there will be far fewer inventions and advanced in knowledge in the future.

Higher education is not especially supportive of students with disabilities. The quotes you gave from faculty, were they directed at minority students, would result in university wide uproars and disciplinary action. I realize that some faculty are emotionally immature, other feel threated by smart students (disabled or not). I guess for these individuals, to realize that those of us who were born with wiring askew in our brains (what they would no doubt call defective) and yet be as smart as they are, if not smarter, is perceived as a threat.

Make it a good day.

–Louis–

Hell’s been apoppin’ on the internet all last week on the issue of ADA. On one discussion list I am embroiled in a heated exchange dealing the extent to which a teacher/professor must or should accommodate to the needs of students who are afflicted with LD or any disability for that matter. As the fates would have it, on three other discussion lists the same subject popped up. They were calm compared to the first until on one a professor proclaimed in a tone of no uncertain defiance, “No accommodation without documentation!” Gee, you’d think he was about to dump some tea into a bay. That pronouncement let loose a series “here, heres” that formed like a dark cloud of soul-devouring locusts ravaging fields of the spirit:

“I should decide what is reasonable and unreasonable adjustment in my classes. But, instead someone without a Ph.D. or expertise in my subject injects herself into MY class and tells me what I can or cannot do;
“we should immeidately ask if such students belong in college level classes;” “these students are trying to get off easy;”
“we just have enough funds to make these accommodations the students demand;”
“the demands being made by some of our students just are not reasonable;”
“if I didn’t have to worry about being sued, I’d treat them just like I do any other student. If they didn’t like that, they could enroll in someone else’s class;”
what the law says we must do and just do what is required;”
“I fail to see why I have to change my approach in the classroom for one or two students;”
“the testing system for these students is not beyond reproach. Until it is, I fail to see why I must be forced to give some students special consideration;”
“It’s my opinion that most of these students are merely unprepared and undiscipline and not dedicated;”
“I made all the accomodations asked of me and the student still only received a C. I don’t see where it was worth the effort;”
“I’ve read that there are questions of whether all these LD conditions really exist;”
“we’re lowering the standards of our institutions. We just can’t everyone in;”
“I believe these requests disturb other students;”
“I resent a staff person telling a member of the faculty how to teach his class;”
“it isn’t fair to other students to give some extra consideration;” “it truly is inconvenient and time consuming to make up different tests or offer different types of exams;
“these students just aren’t as dedicated as they used to be;”
“the cost of hiring personnel and adding to the bureaucracy that is increasingly burdening our institution is by no means justified by the supposed the benefits to these so very few students;”
“I shouldn’t have to take time out of my busy schedule to give additional exams just to accommodate a student who is in school only because they’re letting anyone in; “It’s a hard world out there and they’re got to learn how to be hardened.”
“what did these students do before we had to cater to them?”
“I have to spend extra time I don’t have to cater to these students.”

After reading these message day after day after day–I lurked on this list–I almost got the feeling that some of these supposed educators would prefer if we kidnapped, gaged, blindfolded, bound, and threw these intrusive students afflicted with LD and other disabilities off a bridge like the unwanted runts of a litter. Maybe that’s being too harsh, but on the subject of accommodation to LD I’m not about pretend that I can step back or can be objective, distant, disengaged, clinical, detached, abstract, theoretical, philosophical with a spectator mentality or a passer-by uninvolvement or an onlooker consciousness. I don’t want to be cold and sterile and removed. As a human being, a teacher, and a father the images of my ADHD afflicted son being drained of his energy, having his self-confidence sucked out of him, having his humanity diminished, having his pleading hands cut off, all burn pass my retina so deeply into my soul that scars can’t form to hide them.

You know, I read these cavalier but faceless abstracts, nameless theories, impersonal generalities, defenses, rationalizations, excuses, explanations, half-truths (which are disguised forms of half-lies) and hair-splitting legalities that so many academic find so easy to slip into; I see how easy they find it to forget that they are talking about very real people–someone’s son or daugher–and I wonder who has the real disability. They are so worried about legal protections for themselves, so concerned about their precious and so often unexamined “that’s the way we’ve always done it” curricula and pedagogical stuff, so afraid that academic armageddon is at hand, so defensive about an invasion of their classroom sanctuary, so quick to jump and hide behind self-serving “I told you sos” that so many tend to forget about offering more than verbal support and encouragement of the sideline pom-pom waving, “rah-rah” variety to some very special, and precious people who refuse to be disabled and wish simply to be contributing and independent human beings. These are truly beautiful people; they’re hummingbirds, not cockaroaches. They display more courage in one day than some of us in the ivory tower do in a life time. They don’t want a handout; they simply want a legitimate shot at life and happiness and success, want a bit of flexibility to allow them to demonstrate that they got what it takes and what they got, refuse to be locked up and to be hidden away knitting potholders and fashioning brooms and putting together idiotic trinket kits and reduced to begging in airport lounges and on street corners, rightly demand that we cast aside the chains of our prejudice and see that they have “this ability and that talent.” Is that so much to ask?

But no. They are so quick with the “No, I can’ts” or “No, I won’ts” and so slow with the “yes, let’s see hows.” So quick to condemn by inference or explication or gesture anyone who needs the assistance of an out-stretched hand, who doesn’t keep a stiff upper lip, who can’t “grim and bear it,”and who isn’t some mythical, herculean self-made person damning his own torpedoes and going full speed ahead is weak, a con-artist, a moocher, is lazy, a free-rider, a loafer, or an abuser. They are so quick with whipping out the budgets from our holster to show why we can’t afford to be sensitive and understanding while we spend untold dollars to build or reburbish sports stadiums, so quick with going through the motions, so quick to resist assuming the responsibility of someone else’s well-being except in the most distant, passive and convenient of ways. They are so quick to use the same defensive and offensive language like some chemical insecticide over the recent decades against women and African-Americans, and students who “aren’t the way they used to be” in defense of keeping our institutions pest-free.

Maybe that’s what ADA and accommodation is really all about. It’s not about getting a free ride or a hand-out. It’s not about charity. And it’s not just about helping people, going ever so slightly out of our way, in their struggle to change the way they see themselves and others see them. It’s also about letting them help us to change how we see ourselves. Maybe, that’s what we are really talking about, and it scares the hell out of a lot of us. It is simply asking each of us to act like a mensch, to follow the golden rule, to truly care and love, to think about how we would feel if it is us or it is our son or daughter we are talking about, to look at ourselves in the mirror and to deal with the disabilities of our own biases and prejudices.

There are still far too many of our colleagues on our campuses, who harbor disdainful attitudes and fight or resist in various ways and to various degrees. And even if they follow the letter of the law, write statements in their syllabi, sign letters of agreement, do so only under duress and in their mind under the threat of litigation. They may go coldly through the motions, but do so without the warming spirit of compassion. They may comply, but they are not committed. The sceptical, legalistic, cynicical words leap out that yield a pervading emptiness rather than a fullness. Such people are so quick at glancing at the outside when they should be searching for something inside; they’re so long on criticsm and so short on community and passion; they so tightly embrace disdain and annoyance and weakly hold on to the love; they’re so inclined to turn their backs, and so reluctant to face these students; and, as a high school teacher said, they find it so easy to cut off the hand that reaches out for comfort and assistance rather than firmly and lovingly grasp it and refuse to let go.

As I told an e-mail friend, I think the real mark of whether we have a commitment for not letting these beautiful people fall through the cracks without a fight is not whether we make accommodations in accordance with ADA, but whether we make them without ADA. How many times have we heard colleagues at conferences, in the hallways, during meetings, at social gatherings, in coffee clutches talking about the interference of the special needs office in the inner sanctum of their classroom. How many times have we heard our colleagues say in a tone of either/and relief and defiance, or maybe we’ve said it ourselves,”well, a student told me that he or she had a learning disability, but isn’t enrolled in the special needs program. So, I don’t have to do anything if I don’t want to.” That speaks volumes about the extent, depth, and nature of our real passion for the student and the extent to which they are willing to accommodate ourselves to the needs of each student.

The question is whether we have to be “forced” to be feign understanding, sensitive, compassionate, and flexible; whether we begrudgingly accommodate under the threatening sword of a “must do”; or whether we are guided by the shining and loving light of “the right thing to do.”

Make it a good day.

–Louis–