[I started this post in July and then lots happened. I’m working on letting go of my expectations for this blog and hope to start posting shorter and more informal things rather than creating a backlog of half written posts in my brain!]
July is disability pride month. The Americans with Disabilities Act was originally signed into law on July 26, 1990. This flag was first designed in 2019 and then redesigned in 2021 to be more accessible to people like me who have vision challenges. They changed the colors from bright to more muted and moved from a zigzag to the simpler design you see here.
Note: yellow also includes learning disabilities and cognitive impairment
Learn more about the history of the ADA by reading the book Being Heumann, by Judith Heumann who sadly passed away earlier this year.
In the intro post I said “I’m not new to being disabled, I am new to being so significantly disabled. My health has been and continues to be a significant part of my identity.”
Different people interpret disability pride in different ways. I can imagine most able-bodied people wouldn’t understand why anyone would be proud to be disabled. For me, it’s not about being excited to have my disabilities, instead it’s about not experiencing shame around them.
I spent the majority of my teaching career focused on supporting students with disabilities in both inclusion and contained classrooms. (Inclusion classes are ones that are all the regular grade level content, with a mix of students, and sometimes the content teacher – me as the math teacher – is joined by a special education teacher. Contained classes are made entirely of students with disabilities and may be a specific type – I’ve taught both autism spectrum and language based classes – or a mixed set of disabilities all at the same place in content.) In fact, I did some of my pre-practicum hours in a school entirely for students with disabilities. I’ve seen the full range of students who are well-versed in their needs and can advocate for themselves to students whose parents have largely pretended that their disabilities don’t exist.
My parents didn’t have to make that choice because my first disability was allergies and I needed to know how to ensure that I did not eat peanuts, so there was no decision about whether or not to educate me on my needs. Different disabilities are accepted to drastically different degrees, there’s very little stigma around a peanut allergy in the current era while people with cognitive disabilities are too often excluded from conversations about their own life choices. By the time I was a classroom teacher I had multiple diagnosed disabilities. People see basic vision challenges that can be corrected with glasses as a normal thing at this point and my pollen allergies are less relevant in the fall when school starts, so I used my hearing loss as a way to model to students how to communicate about disabilities and advocate for accommodations. On the first day of school every year I would invite students to fill out a short survey, sharing information about themselves that would be relevant to their learning, and also would be a way to compare how they felt at the beginning of the school year to the end. At the end of the survey, there was a question that asked, “Is there anything else that you want Ms. Cardone to know?” I would model the types of responses that I would like included there by saying,
“I would like all of you to know that I cannot hear out of my right ear, so that means when you call my name I need you to both speak up and also wave because I will hear someone say Ms. Cardone, and then I will have to scan the entire classroom to try and identify which voice it was that just called to get my attention. So it’s much easier if you’re making eye contact and waving me down.”
This empowered some students to share information about themselves that would inevitably be useful, and I suspect most of them would not have shared it on day one otherwise.
I spent the rest of the school year encouraging students to self-reflect on what they needed in order to be able to learn – mathematics in particular, but also more generally. I learned a few years ago that most people see images in their heads when they think about things, and my thought process is entirely verbal. I have an internal voice, and there are no internal images. Turns out this is called aphantasia and people with aphantasia tend to have a poorer memory than other people do, so I would frequently speak to my students about how I needed strategies to remember things, and using strategies was not cheating. The strategies that I used for my memory supported students with executive dysfunction along with students who needed the memory support.
Okay, so what was the point of this post? Right, disability pride. I hoped to teach my students in the classroom that a disability is not something to be ashamed of and each of them has different needs when it comes to navigating through the world and certainly navigating through school.
Additionally, my allergies are often my go to fun fact about myself at a social event, because they tend to make me unique. Everyone enjoys listening to the story of the baby who was born allergic to milk, including breast milk, formula and any of the types of milk that were available in 1985. Through the miracles of modern medicine I was able to drink a pure amino acid mix. It was green, and my parents felt very guilty. They worried other people were judging them for feeding me green goop as a baby but they got me through and I made it to childhood where I learned to swallow pills at a very young age because steroids don’t come in chewable form. I skipped out on a lot of the ableist unlearning that my peers have had to go through because I needed medication to survive from a very young age and it was never a question of whether or not taking medicine was healthy or natural. It was necessary and so I happily did it. I also proceeded to do 10 years of allergy shots before leaving for college and got all of my vaccines because both of my parents came from the field of medicine and knew the importance of vaccinating the population.
In a future post, I will share how my energy limiting chronic illness of allergies defined the hobbies that I chose, and those sadly are no longer accessible to me, but I am continuing to adapt and adjust. It has at least been a smaller adjustment for me to add on additional energy limiting conditions than it would be for someone who was an extroverted, active person prior to getting Long Covid. I have many of the skills that were already required which may be part of why I’ve been able to move quickly from diagnosis to acceptance to pride, and being ready to share publicly both in my Long Covid community groups, as well as with a broader audience. In particular, having an audience of educators feels like an important audience to reach, because schools are jam packed with humans in small spaces, which is exactly how this virus likes to spread. The impacts of Long Covid are going to be extremely visible in some cases, but more subtle in others, and I hope that I can help educators identify challenges that they and their colleagues are facing as well as those of their students.
To read more about my thoughts on connecting hearing loss with education check out this blog post from a previous job
What questions do you have about disability? I am planning a “terms to know” post at some point. Are there words or phrases that I have used or you’ve heard others use when talking about Long Covid or any of my conditions that you’d like definitions for?
Tina Cardone 