Hey so... it’s like that 2am random thoughts time and after asking some people I’ve got to know something.. I know I’m not a big account but if you know anything about this feel free to reblog or something..
Has anyone else experienced “disabilities week”? It was this odd school thing where everyone in the class would be assigned a disability and have to act like they had it for that week. They told me it was supposed to teach us to understand, respect and want to help those with said disabilities. All of the disabilities were physical ones like being wheelchair bond, not having a limb, blind, deaf, mute stuff like that. Was I the only one or was this something that happened elsewhere? To me it really seemed off and didn’t really seem to tech you about disabilities.. at most it seemed to be acting as if these abilities were horrible thing people should feel terrible for having and at worst was simply using “teaching about disabilities” as a cover for shaming children for things they maybe good at or punishing what teachers like to call trouble makers.
I’m not sure how to do the keep reading thing but I’ll give a little bit of a summary of what happened for me Incase it may help others recognize it or Incase you just wanted to know what you did during it..
I used to be pretty friendly and talkative and had friends in band, track, and art. This info will be important later. The teacher starts the week off by informing us that today is disabilities week and that we’ll be doing something special for it. She then assigns each of us a disability and informs us that we’ll be expected to act as though we have that disability for the entire week as long as were on school grounds. I get assigned mute and I’m informed that I will be using a notepad to act as my speech. My friend in band gets deaf and is given a pair of high quality ear plugs and are told to wear them and ask those around them to write what their saying to her unless she can read lips well. My friend on the track team got wheelchair bond and was given said wheel chair at the start of every morning and asked my friend in band to push him around. And my friend in art got “missing arm” specifically their dominant arm was then put in a sling mitten as they were told they couldn’t use it for the week even for writing. This was before high school so we didn’t have a bunch of other teachers who’d need to know the rules just the band teach and PE coach. Most of the week as bad for me and my friends and if you think about it you can likely tell why. However about half way through the week she was asking us questions about something in social studies when this interaction took place.
Teacher: “what word from the vocabulary means a gathering of people celebrating an event?” Looks to me and gestures at me “Why don’t you answer?”
Me: looks up about to speak but remembers I’m not allowed and writes down “Feastivle”(I didn’t quite know how to spell the word at the time since spelling is something I’ve never been good at)
Teacher:”dear.. I don’t know what a ‘Feast-Ive-Le’is so I’m afraid your incorrect... anyone else know the answer.”
Me:annoyed that I spelled it wrong but again can’t speak or argue so I just look down at the word I wrote trying to figure out what I did wrong.
Teacher:”Yes! Well done!” Looks at me again seeming vaguely annoyed. “See it’s not that hard you didn’t even give me a Vocab word. Maybe you should be paying more attention to the book in class hmm?”
The class looked at me as if I was some sort of idiot and the rest of the week they actively used the fact I couldn’t talk to bully and harass me and when I wrote asking the teacher to fix it she’d actively read any spelling error with a weird tone and act like she couldn’t tell what I meant because of it and ignored me...
So has anyone else experienced something like this? I really gotta know.. it just always felt wrong but I thought everyone did this.. kinda like how I used to think everyone had the science fair.. i don’t know but if anyone knows someone or has had this people let me know
