I have a disability so I can do anything I want

The BBQ Pit
161

One thing I have noticed is that the most common accomodations with education are often cpunterproductive. I teach high school, and it seems like everyone and their brother has an “extra time” accomodation. Extra time is often the worst thing in the world for kids with executive function or attention issues. They end up with an overflowing pile of stuff to work on, and they are always focusing on the oldest assignments, so their homework is trailing their class experience by days or weeks, making both class work and homework more difficult and confusing. Even extra time on tests or quizzes is problematic, because either they have to miss class to finish (take this out in the hall and finish), or come before or after school, which is logistically complicated for student and teacher (especially if the teacher only has a handful of times/days that work and they don’t work for the student. What is reasonable?). So a kid ends up staying after for multiple tests a week and then goea home to chip away at homework that was meant to help them prepare for the test they juat took.

A kid can just end up utterly snowed under in these conditions. Shortening tests and assignments is almost ALWAYS the better option. But 504 coordinators and parents always seem to prefer extra time.

Anither example is requiring kids to keep a written assignment notebook. Planners work great for planner people, but by the time a kid is in hs, if they aren’t a planner person, they aren’t ever going to be one. They need a system that works for them. But little old lady 504 counselors are jusr convinced that a written planner is universal magic.

Finally, in school the REAL issue is that grades are already an inaccurate kludge for 1000 reasons, and no one wants to admit it. So trying to make accomodations that are “fair” in the context of what is already a deeply flawed dumpster fire is just stupid. Its like worrying about the impact of the salt water on the upholstery as the Titanic slips beneath the waves.

162

I take it that you wanted so badly to fling shit, that you didn’t even bother to read the post that you first responded to?

I quote myself:

But yes, similar to the thread on the shop teacher’s choice of attire, also in the pit, the reason for the OP was not to complain about people who are lying or defrauding the system, it is to take an out of context example, maybe even a fictional one, and use it to malign everyone in that group.

The OP didn’t say, “I don’t like it when people falsely claim to have a disability”, he made the implication that people with disabilities think they can do anything they want. Please note the title chosen by the OP as a reference.

I did not say anything like:

That is something that you made up out of whole cloth. I do not know what motivated you to do so.

163

Thank you for agreeing with me. But has he actually come out and admitted that it was a hypothetical? Either way, the scare quotes suggest he’s not so credulous about the condition as source of genuine disability as he would insist, and if it really was a hypothetical (as you seem to be confident it was?) then that only makes it worse. It would emphasize that he didn’t post in good faith, that he just came up with a strawman caricature of a person with disabilities, the disability he settled on was a mental health condition–some manner of anxiety disorder, or at least something with anxiety as a symptom–and then to top it all off he went ahead and threw in some scare quotes just to give us a wink to let us know he kind of thinks it’s bullshit.

How can you not see the problem with that? It’s problematic that he would frame the issue as he did to begin with, whether he’s relating a true story he personally witnessed or not, but if he just straight up invented a story based on how he imagines this sort of thing plays out, well… I guess I look forward to getting an answer from @Saint_Cad on that. Although I sure am sorry to be ruining his little rant about people with disabilities seeking accommodations. Not.

Well, for starters, I wouldn’t have told it as a story. And I certainly wouldn’t have invented a story (which, I guess is still TBD if that’s the case) just to have a caricature of a person with disabilities to shit all over on a message board.

What perplexes me is that it is somehow unresponsive of me to say: “I wouldn’t have told that story, and I certainly wouldn’t have fabricated it just to get a conversation started on a message board, and I definitely wouldn’t have started a rant and invited others to join in about people with disabilities and the subjective to me reasonableness of their accommodation requests.” Sometimes the only way to win, is not to play, you know? Anyway, I would encourage you to read what I posted in response to @Tfletch1 above if you want something more substantive. Same goes to @Czarcasm: I believe I have now more than covered how I believe this sort of encounter should be handled in the wild, even if not in direct reply to you.

As long as your father didn’t do the modern-day equivalent of post about it (letter to the editor?) sounds like he handled that just fine, so long as he was reasonably compassionate/empathetic in his response.

Exxxxxxactly. Or such has been my read. To the extent it’s true, it’s anecdotal. To the extent it is representative of how people seeking accommodations for disability are handled, it’s fringe. To the extent it provides any sort of example, it’s an example of precisely the kind of stigma people with a range of disabilities, including mental health and neurological conditions (which, again, seem to have been the singular target of the OP), have to deal with day in and day out.

164

Well, I don’t expect to lo lose any sleep over it, if that’s what you mean, but thanks!

165

Nice troll.

166

Which I did and I even said that I did.

167

Fuchs & Fuchs wrote an excellent article on this years ago. Basically it was that even though IEPs are supposed to individualized, SpEd teachers always seem to use the same default accommodations on everyone and this was one of their prime examples.

168

Complete bullshit. You’re as bad as the people that say I’m talking about those faking disabilities or want to deny people with disabilities accommodations.

Again never said that. However SOME people with disabilities do. If I started a thread about dog owners that leave their dog’s crap on other peoples’ lawns, I guess you would assume I’m unfairly talking about all dog owners.

Once again, the OP is specific and limited to people with disabilities that intentionally do whatever they want at work and even if their actions are not due to their disability, they claim their disability will protect them from firing.

So Sunny Daze, ASL2.0, K9BFriender, et al, your turn to answer a question. Do you believe a person with a disability should be able to do what ever they want - and let’s assume that it is not related to their disability - such as steal food from the refrigerator, sexually harass employees, set whatever they want despite mandatory 9 to 5 shifts, etc. without any repercusions whatsoever just because they have a disability?

169

Gawd, all the people and employers who tried to push planners on me. I hate freaking Stephen Covey. I’m not a planner person. I can do my work just fine without one. Foisting a planner on me just adds extra work. ***

*** I didn’t have any special issues. It was just something pushed on everybody.

170

I can certainly concur with this and I didn’t see anything objectionable in the OP unless one chose to interpret it that way.

In fact, 15 years ago I took over from someone who was an excellent example of this, except that she was also devious and manipulative to the extent that, while she was taking advantage of the system, she had defenders who were bamboozled into feeling sorry for while her work was neglected and falling apart. It had become one of those things that any careful person would be afraid to talk about.

When I took over from her I had to clean up her mess (described to me by one senior staff as “broken”); I actually got a professional commendation for fixing it. My boss, who had been her boss as well, once referred to it as the [last name] debacle.

171

Ha! Sounds like someone I had to clean up after, except she wasn’t disabled, she was the mistress of one of the senior executives.

Her desk drawers were stuffed with papers that she was supposed to deal with and didn’t. I really mean stuffed … like crumpled and wedged in. Took me weeks to clean up the mess, and then it took me less than 25% of my time to do the work as it came in.

172

Fun stuff ain’t it? And our mutual boss (we were in the military, hence me knowing my predecessor during a hand-over), who my predecessor would “never forgive”, was a very competent and honourable officer.

173

This is when you realize that not just anybody can do any job. At least well.

174

Why on earth should he have been compassionate and empathetic?

He got bitched at by a grad student who should have damned well known before the first exam that the onus was on him to let my dad know about his dyslexia. Dyslexics don’t have giant forehead tattoos saying “dyslexic”. They don’t have seeing eye dogs. He didn’t have a helper taking notes for him.

175

I am interested in your observations, because that’s the impression I’ve gotten from a distance but it’s hard to know. But I have a sense that a lot of accommodations in school are designed to get the student a passing grade, rather than to help them learn the subject matter or to learn general coping skills that work with their disability.

And then some of them are extremely onerous on the teacher. My husband had a student in one of his college classes who had an accommodation that he could take as long as he wanted with tests and projects. So if my husband gave the class a 10 minute quiz at the start of the class, he would then have to stay in his office for hours and hours that afternoon, proctoring the kid, who would then turn in a quiz that was several pages long. Like, the disabled kid’s quiz might have as many words as all the rest of the quizzes put together, and was a huge bitch to grade. But perhaps as importantly, it couldn’t really have been doing the kid any good to train him to spend that much time on a thing that didn’t need to be done in that much detail.

But, the accommodation came from on-high, and my husband just followed his orders.

176

Deep down in my heart, I think the problem is we treat grades like marks of character. In that mindset, a student making a poor grade indicates a character flaw, which is unwarrented if the student is facing challenges. But that is true foe all sorts of things: if a single mom working two jobs makes a poor grade, that also isn’t a mark of poor character. Every 504 or IEP parent I ever dealt with only cared about grades and their kid not being unfairly penalized. Which makes sense in our current paradigm.

We also use a lot of shortcuts to get good grade distributions at the expense of actually measuring mastery. Time limits are a good example of this. Like, take the time limits off the SAT and the bell curve would shift way over to the right, and I’m really not sure that the kid who needs an extra 30 minutes on each section is any less prepared for college. And a lot of classroom assessments have this same shortcut built in. So we give “extra time” to accomodate kids who have diagnosed disabilities, so that they arent unduly penalized by a limitation that was really bullshit to start with.

It’s also bullshit to have a lot of intermediate grades. If you fail a quiz, but come to understand the topic by the unit test or even final, why should your grade be lower? The conventional wosdom os we need intermediate grades to “force” kids to learn as they go, because without the fear of a consequence, they will procrastinate. I feel like we can address that other ways.

Were I queen of education, every course would be packed with opportunities to get feedback, both qualitative and quantitative, but actual grades would come from untimed assessments at the end that you could retake indefinitely. So your husbamd could let that kid just take his quizzes home and work on them, and he’d give feedback on the first 100 words. But no need to proctor them.

Do that, and we wouldn’t need special accomodations for most conditions, and a lot of our issues about equity (because wealthy people can certainly navigate this system to their advantage) would disappear.

177

I had a student in a language class who has some sort of learning disability (in my mind it’s dyslexia, but I’m not sure the student ever told me). He got double time for exams, but in my judgement, it wasn’t enough, because I was teaching Language X through English, which was his second language. We tried an experiment: when I gave him triple time, he did just fine (not perfect, but B-range grades). With double time or regular time, Fs.

I raised my concerns to the Disabled Students Centr, and they said that 2× was their maximum. So I accommodated him informally, which position I really shouldn’t be in. But the one-size-fits-most accommodations were simply insufficient. And they were very angry for daring to challenge their accommodation, even though I had good evidence that it wasn’t working.

I had another student break her arm and be refused accommodations for the final exam because they wouldn’t allow a “new” disability so close to finals, even though the arm was very clearly broken. I allowed her to type the exam anyway (that was all she was asking for).

178

I’ve seen special accommodations that made sense in academic settings. There was a blind kid in my high school chemistry class. She took her tests in a room alone, with an aid who read the test aloud, and who recorded her answers, which she spoke. (She also had a talking calculator.)

Heck, i took an actuarial exam when i was massively pregnant, and i requested the accommodation of sitting near the door and being allowed frequent bathroom breaks. (I didn’t request extra time for the breaks, in part because i thought it would be harder to negotiate, and in part because i tend to take tests faster than average, and didn’t think I’d actually need extra time )

I think you are right that in a lot of cases, we’d do better removing the time constraint on exams for everyone rather than for selectively picking those people whose disabilities we deem worthy of extra time. And i say that as someone who almost certainly benefitted from the time constraints. I always finished exams.

Good grief. What a minor and relevant accommodation to disallow!

179

It’s helpful in this regard to distinguish between higher education and education of children, I think. By and large the discussion in this thread is about adults and whether they’re gaming the system. K-12 accommodations are a set of different (very complicated) issues from college and graduate ones, because of the different stakes and the different values in play, and how they affect who is involved in the decision-making.

With university accommodations, for the most part the student him or herself is identifying that, and what, accommodations are necessary. By law accommodations are an “interactive process,” which means both the student and the institution have an obligation to be proactive and figure out what accommodations should be in place. The student has to indicate to somebody that an accommodation might be needed. That somebody then has the responsibility, on behalf of the institution, to connect the student to the appropriate person to direct the rest of the process of figuring out what accommodations are reasonable, and making sure they are implemented.

The reason I said all of that is that, if you think about it, with a university student, this setup virtually guarantees that the vast majority of accommodations will be geared toward helping a student pass a class. The most obvious and common physical disabilities should be addressed without a need for particular accommodations; schools just should already have ramps and elevators and extra parking facilities, etc. So when is a student most likely to first be raising that they need some other accommodation? When they realize they are about to, or have just, failed a class. It’s a very common fact pattern to see – student tried to keep up through the semester, didn’t have accommodations beforehand, asked the professor to accept some work late, or write off some zeroes, or whatever, and then at the end of the semester realizes they’re in trouble and says “hey I shouldn’t fail this class, I can do the work!”

Unfortunately this often sets student against professor (if the professor had voluntarily granted an informal accommodation, the conversation wouldn’t have continued after all) with accusations of bad faith on both sides. Faculty often perceive a student making a last-ditch attempt to save themselves after they “failed” to do the work; students see a faculty member who won’t make some trivial alteration to policy which would allow them to complete a course at no real cost to anyone.

It’s really charged, and often completely brutal. There really are not one-sized solutions. It would be silly to say no student ever tries to pull a fast one. It would be equally silly to believe that schools never deny accommodations on that basis that they should for sure be approving. And with mental illness it’s ten times more challenging.

180

Not only that, denying the accommodation was probably illegal. I had a student that wanted an extra couple of minutes between classes because of her broken leg, the principal refused since it “wasn’t a disability”. When I told him I was more than happy to write up an emergency 504 during my prep period, he relented.