When is a handicap a disability?

 When is a handicap a disability?

 

 

In 1975, the Education of All Handicapped Children (EHA) was signed into law.  The world for kids with handicaps changed on that day.  No longer could schools exclude any child because the child had a handicap that the school chose not to serve.  All children regardless of disability had the right to a free and appropriate public education.

You will notice that in the above paragraph the word “handicap” was used repeatedly to refer to a child who was not typical.  That, too, changed in 1990 when the name of the EHA was changed to the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA).  Benefits to children with disabilities were improved and so was the language referring to these children.

But the underlying question is, other than vocabulary what else changes when a person with a handicap is now called a person with a disability.

Well, the answer is, it depends.  A handicap does not need to be a disability.  A person with a disability is also a person with many other abilities.  We can concentrate on the disabilities or we can choose to extol what our abilities are.

Viktor Frankl is a Holocaust survivor.  He has written multiple books but the one that is probably read most often is Man’s Search for Meaning.  He says we can discover the meaning of life in three different ways.   We can create a work or do a particular deed.  We experience something or some one person.  And finally, by the attitude we take toward unspeakable suffering.   Surely this was a man who has endured “unspeakable suffering”.  Yet, he says that even though almost everything can be taken from a person, what cannot be taken is the attitude toward that suffering we each choose to take.

So while a handicap may definitely cause difficulty and suffering, each individual may chose to make that suffering a disability while recognizing the abilities that are also within that person.

A person on the Autism spectrum has the ability to pay very close attention to details, a great skill if you wish to be a programmer.  A person with cognitive limitations may have a great ability to see through the pomp and circumstance of life and see the true person.

Each of us has many disabilities.  Each of us also has many abilities.  It is when we attend to the abilities that our disabilities are less likely to become handicaps.

what are you writing about

 What are you writing about?

 

Do we really need to write?  Write cursive that is.  In a time when most writing is done on some digital device rather than with a pen or pencil, is teaching cursive still relevant or should we just concentrate on keyboarding skills.  Lots of administrators think the latter.  Yet regardless of that attitude, cursive seems to be making a comeback, particularly in the nation’s largest public school systems.  As of 2016, 14 states require cursive as part of their curricula.

Teachers have different reasons for wanting to teach cursive as opposed to manuscript (printing).  

Cursive involves a portion of the brain that manuscript does not.  Many teachers believe that at age 7 or 8 when most cursive instruction begins, the activation of this portion of the brain gives students another pathway to learn the alphabet.  Some also believe it will improve manuscript.

It is also thought that teaching a second method for written communication reinforces the learning of the first method and helps students have a better understanding of the alphabet.

There is also the belief that cursive makes adults more comfortable with signing legal documents.  This notion is a bit anachronistic.  While many documents want a written signature, the fact is that even an “x” is perfectly legal for a signature.  Additionally, the feeling that using cursive makes people ultimately more comfortable writing checks is also not borne out in today’s world.  Banks would prefer that people not use a paper check since they are more easily modified in the interest of fraud.  More and more people are sending money electronically, not just to pay bills but to transfer money between private parties.  Many people do not even use paper checks with their checking accounts.

Perhaps, the biggest claim for cursive is its benefit for people with dyslexia.  While manuscript letters often look exactly alike except for the orientation of the letter (here’s looking at you “b” and “d”), with cursive, the letters “hold hands” so reversals are more difficult and the letters themselves look different.

There is also the argument that if we want today’s students to be able to read letters written by their elders, they will need to be able to read cursive. 

As school budgets tighten, as demands are made that schools need to do more during the day perhaps it is time to drop cursive.  Some people who were taught cursive have ceased to use it.  A child's school time is finite.  There are more useful skills, navigating social media and the internet leap to mind, than teaching a skill whose time has come and probably gone.

As we move further into the digital world, perhaps cursive will take its rightful place alongside of the manual typewriter.   That used to be state-of-the art too.

Folks are coming out of the woodwork?

 Folks are coming out of the woodwork!

New research is indicating that the number of adults with autism is growing by leaps and bounds.  Since 2011, the number of people over 18 diagnosed with autism has more than doubled.  Currently, there are over 403,000 adult Medicaid beneficiaries with the diagnosis.  The increase in adults between the ages of 25-34 has jumped 195%!   Curiously the incidence of people with intellectual disability has declined from 62% to 46%.

There has also been a steep increase in the diagnosis of children.  At this time, it is approaching 1 in 36.

The question then becomes, why?

There is an old saying, “seek and thy shall find”.  It may be that we are seeking.  There have been multiple theories advanced about why the increase in children diagnosed with autism.  

Various vaccines have been called into question as the cause of the increase.  None of those theories has been supported by research.

There have been studies that blame older sperm as the cause. While it was interesting to hear that older sperm rather than older eggs were the cause, the theory too has not been supported by independent research.  Other studies have blamed genetics and/or drug use.  All of these theories have also been debunked.

One of the interesting phenomena is that as the number of people on the spectrum has increased the identification of other disability groups has decreased leading one to believe that there may not actually be in increase in people on the spectrum.  But rather a refinement of how we are identifying the various disabilities.

Regardless of the why, there is a critical need to improve services to these individuals.  If it is true that some of these people were previously identified with a different disability, the treatment for autism is very different from those other disabilities and services will need to be created to meet those needs.  Adult individuals who have not received assistance in life skills adaptation are going to need that remedial instruction as adults.

The literature is full of “look back” studies in which it is determined that many famous people were on the spectrum from Thomas Jefferson to Albert Einstein and have been identified as possibly on the spectrum.

So the truth might be that these folks were living in the woodwork all along we just got around to figuring where they were hiding.