I sometimes forget that I work with disabled students (not exclusively, but primarily). I once thought this was a good thing. We are taught, rightfully so, that every disabled person is, first and foremost, a person — hence the re-prioritization of the syntax from “disabled person” to “person with a disability” — and so I teach not to “the disability” but to the person in front of me, with all of that person’s unique strengths and challenges.
This is best practice in the education game (diagnosed disability or no), but it sometimes blinds me to the web of symptoms and the way they work together to create an invisible disability that is just as real and just as all pervasive as the needing of a wheelchair.
The proper response to my recall of this fact is for me to invest time and energy into becoming more familiar with what the experts have to say about how teachers can best support the growth of students who possess such conflux of symptoms, which is why my charge for the summer is to research and (re)produce for the benefit of my colleagues the best ways to work with our kids.
I started the process about a month or so ago, and for the moment, it’s slow going. I’m up to the “D”s in an alphabetic list of official diagnoses for my students. For each diagnosis, I’m scanning the entry in the latest version of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders. I’m then doing a lot of Googling and reading about each diagnosis, copying and pasting (and sometimes simplifying) the best research I can find in a limited amount of time, concentrating my energy on the areas that would best benefit a teacher, rather than, say, a parent, boss, or friend.
The experience of doing this has been incredibly rewarding. I haven’t internalized all of the information yet, and I haven’t yet systematized how or when to apply one piece of this new-to-me knowledge to one of my actual students (I’m moving too fast for that), but the process of forcing my brain to read all of the different ways these brains with disabilities engage the world has strengthened my compassion, increased my patience, and asked of me what can I do to make their worlds a better place.
I love these kids so much — even the ones I can’t stand — and now, at this moment, all I can think about is: those kids on the border.
My school specializes in students whose diagnoses often relate to some kind of trauma (we didn’t specialize in this on purpose; those were the kids who kept coming to us). The kids I teach have experienced the worst that reality has to offer: sexual, physical, and emotional abuse; parental death and/or abandonment; the downstream effects of parental addictions; familial and cultural exile; pain, fear, hate, and rejection.
I know how trauma manifests long after the traumatic event is over; I face it every day.
The last numbers I saw suggest that the United States government is forcibly removing children from parents at a rate of roughly 45 a day. The numbers are so high that the government is reportedly building tent cities to house them all; they have already filled abandoned shopping centers with these children — infants, toddlers, and all.
This is not something the children will get over. It will result in millions upon millions of dollars being spent by some assortment of government agencies to ease their way through life, whether through special education grants or through public mental-health services. If resources aren’t committed to managing the fall-out from this government-sponsored internment of an entire population, the result will be one of intense and uncontrollable anger and/or intense and uncontrollable fear (often made manifest through a bodily-violent rejection of the norm).
If the government isn’t creating a dearth of its financial resources in restitution to this crime against humanity, then it is creating an entire generation of south and central American terrorists, adding even more fuel to whatever negative reality drives these people north in the first place.
If you can’t find it in you to cry shame for our government’s current actions, then find it within you to feel the affront of the government’s actions harming your self-interest. Interning these children and destroying these families will only result in the creation of more financial dependents and the sending into action of more American soldiers.
As someone who works everyday with the victims of childhood trauma, I tell you: No good will come from this, only more and more trauma.