If I have one education-related regret, it’s this:

When I took foreign language classes in college, I didn’t know auditory processing disorder existed.

I chose to take a (300-level) class that focused on speaking and listening. To challenge myself. I knew it would be hard for me and I wanted to shore up that area of my skills.

One of the class participation requirements was that you spend a certain number of meals (I think it was twelve?) sitting at a table in the cafeteria staffed by a student employee and chatting exclusively in the language you were studying.

I think I went three or four times, and then I accepted that I couldn’t handle it and I wasn’t going to get those points.

Because I didn’t know, I didn’t understand, I didn’t have the concept that I legitimately have more trouble with background noise than most people. I didn’t have the words to say “I understand Spanish, I just can’t hear you.” I didn’t have the words to say “I can hear, but not with a hundred other people talking in the same room.”

I almost had the words to say “I speak just as little in the cafeteria when everyone’s speaking English,” but I didn’t believe it was an actual problem. I just thought I had to try harder to do as well as everyone else.

Theoretically, though, it is an actual disability. I should have been able to get actual disability accomodations, for it. I shouldn’t have had things my brain doesn’t do well counted against me as failure to study or slacking off. (No, I’m not exaggerating. When I went to the Spanish-practice table and didn’t talk enough, by whatever the student worker’s standard was, I got dirty looks and passive-aggressive complaints about how they had to give me credit for attending even though I wasn’t doing anything.)
I don’t know if my college or my professors would have actually taken it seriously, even if I’d had a diagnosis and all the boilerplate I ought to have, but. That shouldn’t have happened.

——

Prompted by people on Tumblr talking about “modified language learning” programs for people with disabilities.

Cultural differences

When I was in college, I took a class in the education department. It was supposed to be aimed at everyone as a basic discussion of the current state of public schools in the US. There were a lot of things I didn’t like about it, but one thing it did decently was discussing how cultural differences can cause trouble for students– like, differences in when and how it’s considered okay to speak up and ask questions, differences in how people show respect to authority, differences in writing/communication style.

And I really identified with that, although I felt conflicted about it because it wasn’t meant to be about me and there wasn’t any reason why I should feel that way.

But yeah, I found the things I was taught in elementary/middle school about writing totally nonsensical. Because things that make sense when you’re writing a ten-page paper on an obscure topic are totally unreasonable and unnecessary when you’re writing one paragraph about hamburgers. But it really bothered me. I wanted to do a good job of communicating by my own standards, as well as follow the rules of the assignment, but what I was being asked to do seemed so wrong that I felt completely stuck. (I’ve never been able to “bs” my way through writing of any kind. I just can’t do it. Maybe some of that is fear of saying the wrong thing, like I’ve talked about before, but I think some of it is just me. Words are too important for me to not try to make them real and meaningful.)

I would have been so happy in a class like the one I read about, that essentially taught kids to code-switch between a wordy, formal, academic style, and a short, to-the-point style that was more familiar to them, and talked about the advantages of both.

Giftedness

I never believed all the stuff (which apparently some other “gifted” kids absorb and take to heart?) about high IQ or giftedness making you better than other people. For whatever reason, I was always aware that there were plenty of things I wasn’t good at– including academic things. I was definitely in awe of the subset of “math-gifted” kids who could do complicated mental math very quickly. I have always been bad at keeping things like that straight in my head without writing them down.

Maybe part of it is beacuse I don’t actually know my IQ? I know I was given something along the lines of an IQ test as a young child, and I know I scored well enough to be allowed to start school early, but I have no idea what the actual number was (or exactly what kind of test it was.) I did know my scores on assorted standardized tests throughout school, and I knew that I got very high scores, including more than one “99th percentile” (meaning, I did better than 99% of students who took the test.)

Another facet of it is, lacking perspective in the usual way that kids do, when something was easy and obvious for me it didn’t really occur to me that it was hard for other people, so I didn’t see it as a big accomplishment. I felt confused that other people didn’t understand things, not superior. And I even think I managed to avoid being shitty and condescending about it, because I so much didn’t understand that I didn’t even bring up the topic. I had no idea where to start understanding their perspective, so I didn’t really try. I just vaguely accepted that other people didn’t understand certain things.

Which was bolstered by all the things I thought were fascinating that other people didn’t care about, and the things I didn’t understand but other people did. I saw a bunch of confusing differences of perspective, not a superior perspective and a weaker perspective.

Honestly I think part of it is that I internalized the idea that various other things made me a bad person too much to feel superior about my intelligence. Actually, scratch that. I internalized the idea that my intelligence or maybe my perspective, in itself, was a negative thing that would make people mock me and avoid me. I know, I guess, that some people react to that kind of treatment in a contrary way, by holding tight to the idea that things other people don’t like about them are actually the best things about them. I just never did that. I don’t know why.

In an alternate universe I might have other people telling me that my intelligence made me better, but honestly I don’t think I ever heard that. I heard that it made people’s expectations higher, that’s about it. It focused people’s slightly intimidating attention on me, and made them project all sorts of weird expectations onto me, and I knew that a little bit even as a kid.

(It still stings a little that I was once punished for reading too fast instead of waiting for the rest of the class. And all the things I did that were wrong doctrinally, so to speak, even though they made sense mathematically, grammatically, etc. And I would come in all full of fire and desire to learn and try to explain why I thought I was right, and just get stonewalled, and it turns out to be something like “it’s easier to grade this way”.)

“Writing to cause controversy”:

I can’t stand it.

I get playing devil’s advocate, in some situations, if you explicitly say that that’s what you’re doing. Sometimes I’ll say things along the lines of “I don’t believe this myself, but I know some people who think that _____. What do you think about that?”

But I get incredibly frustrated with, for instance, teachers who deliberately say things that are ambiguous, confusing, and that they don’t believe just to cause controversy. It’s one thing to do this when there is a clear-cut correct answer, which you’re going to explain eventually, and when you know that the students have the tools to figure out what’s wrong with what you’re saying. But to take a complicated situation with no clear-cut answer and just try to stir up as much controversy as possible? That doesn’t help! If you want to talk about many different opinions and points of view, present them honestly and talk about the pros and cons and how they differ. Maybe you think that you’re letting the students judge for themselves or encouraging them to look critically at each point of view. What I see happen is this: either they uncritically accept whichever one fits comfortably with what they already think, or they end up confused and not knowing anything about any of them except the kind of catchy but oversimplified and misleading talking points that you’d yell at the other side during a poorly moderated debate. (Shouting points, instead of talking points, maybe?)

[Okay, part of the reason I carry a grudge about this is that often, it actually involves really narrowing the field of debate and criticism. You get into the particular debate the teacher wants you to get into, and you’re left with no chance to question the assumptions behind it or the actual points either side is using. I’m thinking of the time when the professor for my class on public education wanted us to argue about whether it was okay for schools to accept money or valuable gifts from soda companies in exchange for allowing vending machines to be placed in the school. No room in there for “everything you’ve heard about the “obesity epidemic” is wrong”. The prof smiled at me and thanked me for participating and was so completely uninterested in actually questioning “soda makes kids fat, which is bad” that I don’t even want to call it 0% interested, it was more like a negative number.]

But unrelated to my bad experiences with education, I really feel like I can’t completely trust people who do this. I feel like I have to constantly watch everything they say to see whether it’s sincere. I know that people can do this and still have totally interesting and worthwhile sincere things to say, and I know I can generally tell what’s sincere and what’s not, with enough time and effort– I’ve maintained friendships with people who do this. But I don’t like having to engage with people that way.

I want to tell you all about something I realized last year.

I’m not sure I’ll do a very good job of explaining it, and I don’t have the book I’m talking about anymore so I can’t refresh my memory, but here goes.

For one of my college classes (an overview of modern United States history), I had to read The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader, It has a prologue written by Vincent Harding, which unfortunately is not part of Amazon’s preview. Harding does something I’d never really heard before: he talks about events before the 1950s in the context of racism and civil rights. He describes people waiting and searching for opportunities to take the fight against racism to a larger scale, and how various important events looked from that point of view.

And I had to put my book down and take a long walk to calm down, because: it is seriously fucked up that I had never heard anything like this before. This is what people mean when they say that history (as it’s taught in the average high school classroom, anyway) is written from a white point of view and erases the viewpoint and agency of people of color. This is what they mean: not only had I not been told about things like this, it never even occurred to me to wonder what it was like to be African-American during World War I, for example. I’m pretty sure my high school US History class mentioned racism in relation to exactly three topics: the Civil War, the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, and World War II (in relation to anti-Japanese propaganda, and the internment of Japanese Americans.) Except for those times when racism became a big, public issue, the usual history curriculum goes along as if everyone were white.

And I should have known better, I really should have! I spent my teenage years reading blog posts and articles speculating about same-sex marriage, when it would become legal across the country, where it would be best to campaign for it next, etc. So I knew, if I’d thought about it, that before something becomes a big political issue, there are years of people hoping and thinking and planning behind the scenes to get it there. I should have known that the Civil Rights movement was the same way. I should have known that people in the ’30s and ’40s must have sometimes sat up late wondering how the political events of the moment would change things for racial equality in the US. But nobody ever showed me that point of view. Nobody really showed me things from the point of view of the 1960s Civil Rights activists, either, but I think that’ll have to wait for another post.