Addition to the Disability History Calendaer: January

[capri0mni]

[Image description: A digital rendering of the Disability Pride Flag (five parallel lightning bolt lines [blue, gold, green, red, and purple] running diagonally across a black field) flying at the top of a flagpole, with a partially sunny/partially cloudy sky in the background. The flag is flying above the words: “This Month in Disability History” in dark purple letters. Description Ends]

Edited to add: 8 January, 1942: (Birthday) Stephen Hawking, Theoretical Physicist, Cosmologist, Author. Living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) Professor Hawking is a wheelchair user and uses a speech synthesizer to communicate. [Wikipedia Article about him]

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Happy Birthday, Professor Stephen Hawking!

You know, my aide (who is also an aide to a school-age boy who is a non-verbal wheelchair user, and gets to see how American public schools treat their “Special Ed” students up close every day) once commented that if Stephen Hawking’s disability had begun when he was a child, instead of when he was in his 20s, teachers and therapists would spend the rest of his life trying to teach him to tie his shoes, before they even tried to teach him anything else.

I think she’s right.

And I can’t help but wonder how many potentially brilliant children are never given the chance to discover their brilliance simply because our society has an inflexible and ableist attitude toward communication modes.

Comments

[igenlode]

I think she's right: the standard developmental model assumes that children master physical skills (e.g. tying shoelaces) before they develop intellectual skills, which tends to feed into an assumption that if they never master the former then they never reach the stage of mastering the latter.

Likewise, a physical difficulty with speech is interpreted by default as an intellectual difficulty...

[capri0mni]

Yes. About a year and a half ago, the doctor prescribed in-home physical therapy for me. And about three quarters of our sessions into it, the therapist told me I have mixed ataxic and spastic Cerebral Palsy, because people with pure spastic C.P. are all mentally retarded, and I'm clearly not retarded, so, therefore, I must have ataxic C.P. in there somewhere... I do not, by the way.

Oh, and Ataxic C.P. affects the muscles in an almost opposite way from spastic C.P. -- so she was giving me exercises to do, based on a completely false assumption about I.Q.

*Headdesk*

This is why I have very little trust in medical professionals.