You Are Special! Now Stop Being Different
- 7 years ago
You Are Special! Now Stop Being Different
When my foot was bouncing, she would stop class, point at me and say at the top of her lungs, “Jonathan, what is your problem?”
Sitting still was hard enough, but I also struggled with reading and was placed in the “dumb” group.
So as I headed across the room to find my reading group, “Spot” went in my backpack, under my shirt,
because as I walked by the other kids the taunts would start: “Jonathan, go back to the dumb reading group.”
Reading out loud in class was a special kind of hell.
What disabled me were limitations not in myself but in the environment: the passive learning experience where students sit at a desk most of the day; a narrow definition of intelligence conflated with reading and other right-brain skills; and a medicalization of differences
that reduced my brain to a set of deficits and ignored the strengths that go hand in hand with many brain differences.
Teachers didn’t actually call us the “dumb” group,
but let’s be real: Everyone knew which group was the “smart” group and which wasn’t — my school had the California Condors, the Blackbirds, the Bluebirds, and then over in the annex trailer building, the Sparrows.
I spent the day reading “See Spot Run” while the Condors were probably finishing up “War and Peace.”
Joking aside, no matter what the reading groups were named, kids knew their place on the intelligence bell curve.
I had a second-grade teacher, Ms. C — I have had many gifted teachers in my life, for which I am grateful, but Ms. C wasn’t one.
This is how it went down: Five seconds into class, the foot starts bouncing; 10 seconds in, both feet; 15 seconds, I bust out the drums!
Shamed at home at the dinner table with my dad, where I heard “Stop it stop it stop it what is wrong with you?” And I was shamed in school.
When my foot was bouncing, she would stop class, point at me and say at the top of her lungs, “Jonathan, what is your problem?”
Sitting still was hard enough, but I also struggled with reading and was placed in the “dumb” group.
So as I headed across the room to find my reading group, “Spot” went in my backpack, under my shirt,
because as I walked by the other kids the taunts would start: “Jonathan, go back to the dumb reading group.”
Reading out loud in class was a special kind of hell.
What disabled me were limitations not in myself but in the environment: the passive learning experience where students sit at a desk most of the day; a narrow definition of intelligence conflated with reading and other right-brain skills; and a medicalization of differences
that reduced my brain to a set of deficits and ignored the strengths that go hand in hand with many brain differences.
Teachers didn’t actually call us the “dumb” group,
but let’s be real: Everyone knew which group was the “smart” group and which wasn’t — my school had the California Condors, the Blackbirds, the Bluebirds, and then over in the annex trailer building, the Sparrows.
I spent the day reading “See Spot Run” while the Condors were probably finishing up “War and Peace.”
Joking aside, no matter what the reading groups were named, kids knew their place on the intelligence bell curve.
I had a second-grade teacher, Ms. C — I have had many gifted teachers in my life, for which I am grateful, but Ms. C wasn’t one.
This is how it went down: Five seconds into class, the foot starts bouncing; 10 seconds in, both feet; 15 seconds, I bust out the drums!
Shamed at home at the dinner table with my dad, where I heard “Stop it stop it stop it what is wrong with you?” And I was shamed in school.