This process began last May with some accommodation requests for a test and has continued. Libby requires a great deal of creative thinking, latitude, and accommodations.
Some of you who are reading don't know the difference, as many don't, between accommodations and modifications. Think of going to a hotel and asking for a room on a lower floor because it makes it easier to get your dog out to walk in the mornings. That is an accommodation as nothing about the room or the hotel rules and regulations have been altered. Asking for a doggy door to be added or taken away from your hotel room is a modification.
In education, we can accommodate students who learn differently by giving them access to the books, lectures, and/or notes as a recording. We can accommodate by allowing a scribe, Braille, an ASL interpreter, and a seat away from distractions. In English classes I may assign three essays over a span of many weeks. Each essay may consist of the culmination of mini and major lessons on thesis statements, supporting details, and embedding quotations. An accommodation would be to assign and work through one essay with a student who struggles, while making sure that each part of the essay was there. A modification would mean that the entire focus would change and the student would only write using one of the three components that the other students were required to write.
Accommodations make learning more accessible and modifications usually mean that a change is made in the curriculum.
Every person learns differently. If you think back to your education there are probably classes and subjects you just didn't get. Maybe with a little ingenuity you would have been more successful?
This is what it means to me to differentiate instruction. This is the No Excuses part of my belief. It is up to the educator to reach the student and students generally rise above expectation.
Apparently, Liberty and her needs may be outside of adult education. Colleges are held to the same standard as every school when it comes to allowable accommodation and modifications. Every school is different and private schools, those without any federal funding, do not have to accommodate. The content of the course cannot be fundamentally altered. Altered is modified curriculum multipled.
In a meeting, in front of Libby, it was strongly implied that she would not be able to understand or do the work. "This is not high school and we do not make courses easier. She would be expected to learn and do the work".
As a teacher, I would never say things like this in front of a child. All of this was said in front of Libby as if she were deaf. Libby remembers and hears more than anyone wants to know. Rachael removed Libby from the room until our meeting was over.
Libby already knows what she can't do. She has heard it from doctors and from us. She can't move out and get married. She can't go on real dates- right now. She is beautiful and vulnerable and brilliant. And as I said while they were out of the room, she has done everything she was supposed to. She did her work. She kept her attendance up, despite doctor appointments, treatments and surgeries. She has listened and read every book assigned, on our dime, and discussed it as much as her vocalization allowed. She can tell you what she's learned, draw it for you, type it (slowly), and turn it in. She does her math by being given an question and choosing formulas or solutions. She will work it out in her head and choose an answer.
When she creates art it happens in a beautiful variety of ways. Art means to create meaning using a variety of methods. Her methods may be different, but they are hers. Her art represents her, and it seems, that she may be kept from her art because she does not fit in a definable box that is easily recognized by others.
Her hands, arms, legs, and mouth may not work but her brain does. She has scholarships that were awarded based on her accomplishments, not on who she is. Does each kid deserve a chance?
After this head against a brick wall meeting we headed over to drop off other paperwork and give her the campus tour she didn't get to take. She didn't even want to pick out a t-shirt. She didn't want to discuss college this evening. Not even before our prayers. She refused a picture with her first college shirt.
It would be easier to get her SSDI and let her sit at home all day. She has dreams and possibilities. I can't let this one hurdle of inviting a group of people to join our learning curve stop us.
Nothing comes easy. We don't have the support of so many relatives that giving up on her means everything- just as those whose support means everything else.
At the end of this journey we have to be able to say that we did what was right and did it with all our might.
When we as educators give up hope is the moment our students completely stop trying.
Rachael's note: perhaps I may be a bit too blunt, but I cannot sit by and allow anyone to speak as if Liberty were not present in the room. As an educator, I also believe that we should never, never point out what a person can't do. We already fight our own images of self worth without anyone else adding to it. Never, for one moment doubt that I don't know the battle that we fight every day, but don't look at my child and judge what you think you might know. Don't tell me that "we just don't know because we have never faced something like this before." You cannot be the head of disability services and not be willing to try and think outside of the box. I know first hand that education is based on the factory model of education where we are just trying to produce the mass model worker, but when we do that, we forget the individuals that sit in our classrooms--the individuals that we meet every day. And Ileana tells me to say that we continue to believe that people act with the best of intentions until they know how to better. We do and will always assume best of intent because that is how we live our lives.
Our battle is against our own fears of her abilities/non-abilities and against society just as much as the enigmatic progressive degenerative disease that continues to attack her.
We have a college course schedule and an Id. We have another leg of the marathon completed.
