Seven Simple Solutions - but first - a story

It's nice out, and I'm tired of being inside and being angry. The philosophy of education can make my head hurt. And so can the low expectations of supposed liberals with limited agendas for change. So let me tell a short story first, and then repeat a few simple ways to begin changing possibilities.

in a city in Michigan



They come up to me, afterwards, and begin to ask all the questions they will not ask in front of others - not in front of their friends, surely not in front of their teachers. "I want to be..." they begin, or, "I want to go..." or, "I want to do..." and then, "How can I?" or, "Is there a way?" or, "Is there anything that can help me?"

These children have been in school in America - that most powerful nation on earth - that wealthiest of societies - that preacher of equality of opportunity - they have been in school in America for over ten or eleven or even twelve years, and they have received nothing but a list of their limitations. Every day they are measured by the ways that they cannot be exactly like their teachers or those who rule the nation. They cannot hear the same way. they cannot see the same way. They cannot walk the same way, or read the same way, or understand the same way. They might simply not be able to sit still the same way, or they may have been born into a culture that does not see the universe exactly in the same terms that Protestant White people do. And so, in ten, or eleven, or even twelve years they have received nothing but a list of their limitations.

"I want to be a pilot," a boy named Saddam says. "I have been getting flight time with the father of a friend, I am getting very good, I have landed the plane myself already, but I cannot read the Ground School books." I tell him we can get him software that can read these technical books to him. I give him the name of the software. I give him copies of my card and tell him to have both his school teacher and the Ground School to get in touch with me. And I work hard not to say the other things - that this software has been easily available for a dozen years, longer than he has been in school, but those in charge of his education have been too lazy and careless to get it for him. And I do not say that sadly, this third generation American from the heartland of American industrial democracy will have a hard time getting a pilot's job no matter what because probably half of Americans are too stupid to separate this boy's name and religion from their prejudices.

"I have this phone," another boys asks, through a Sign Language interpretor. He holds up a smartphone, the basic lifetool for the deaf in the 21st Century. "Can I get the school to let me use it in school and to unblock their computers so teachers can text message stuff to me?" And I suggest how he and his parents might argue for this. I send him links to the law, my computer to his phone. We talk by text for twenty minutes. I do not say that American institutions of secondary education - like the prisons they most closely resemble - are far more concerned with control and security than anyone's learning - especially his.

"The electric door on the cafeteria broke last year and they say they're still trying to fix it, and I can't get to the bathroom without announcing it and asking friends for help." Again, I bring up the law, and I quickly look up a local advocacy group and recommend it. But I don't say that I am quite sure that if the football stadium's scoreboard broke, it would be fixed immediately, and so would the superintendent of school's laptop, and it is simply that this young women counts for less than others in her community.

"They told me that I couldn't become a paramedic because they wouldn't let me have a reader on the certification test." And all I can say is that, unless things change where he lives, that he may have to cross state lines to a "higher rights" state, or cross the border, which really is not far, and go to a more progressive nation. "Don't let being born here," I tell him, "stop you."

But I know that being born here can stop kids. It can stop them cold. It can stop them dead. America since the election of Ronald Reagan has fallen completely out of the top twenty major nations in social mobility. If you are born poor you will be poor. If you are born with a disability you will be uneducated and you will be poor. If your parents have not been to college you will not finish college. If you are born to the wrong zip code there is a 95% chance that you will never succeed, if you even manage to live to age eighteen.

And while the United States has become a place of inherited wealth and privilege it has ratcheted up the myths of opportunity, thus blaming the poor, the disabled, and those whom prejudice traps for the results of cruel government policy that robs from the poor to enrich those who already have so much.

But I cannot say any of that right here. The people who have invited me are lovely. They are all on the right side. This is not the place to begin a revolution. Those who make the rules that have crushed these children - they are not here. They are not listening. They are too busy handing their money to politicians who will guarantee the future of their tax breaks, too busy buying huge televisions and expensive cars, too busy making sure that neither their kitchen nor their bathrooms look anything but up-to-date. With all that to take care of, they have nothing to share with kids in need.

story copyright 2007-2008 by Ira Socol

Seven Simple Solutions (we have to start somewhere)

Not to make the whole day depressing. Let me repeat a few simple solutions to the most common struggles I see among all kids in schools. Free solutions, and - yes, just so you can start a fight at your local school by quoting me - if your school does not have all these installed and/or linked on every computer - they are guilty of educational malpractice. They are guilty of deciding that access is not important. They are guilty of intentionally leaving children behind.

No school official should ever be allowed to complain about the cost of accommodations until all the free stuff is installed everywhere in the school. If they start to complain, just tell them to shut up and start downloading.

CLiCk-Speak

The Firefox Add-On from Charles L. Chen that makes text on-line accessible to almost every LD student and supports sight-word development. The brilliant simplicity of the three button toolbar, which can fit write into the Firefox bookmark bar or be presented larger separately, allows it to work for students with a very wide range of skills. When combined with Google Docs this system can even allow students to hear their own writing read back to them.

WordTalk

A wonderful new tool offering free text-to-speech within Microsoft Word. Stunningly simple to use. Again, not just a reading support, but a writing support as well. (Thanks to the CALL Centre)

Ghotit

The spellcheck system that most of us need, ghotit.com actually helps to fix the types of spelling and word errors most students - especially dyslexics and English Language Learners - make. It indicates misspelled words and misused words and links corrections to definitions. All you need is a link in your bookmark bar to give your students a real chance at spelling and correct word use.

PowerTalk

Full Measure's PowerTalk is a brilliant solution for the visually impaired and the dyslexic. It reads the PowerPoint slides to you.

AutoCorrect in Microsoft Word

Someone at the Szentannai Samuel Mezogazdasagi Szakkozepiskola Gimnazium Es Kollegium in Hungary was reading my post about mobiles in classrooms the other day. I thought, "I wouldn't want to write or type that every day." Nor, of course, do I want to type the name of my university every time. So I use what's built into Microsoft Word - the AutoCorrect feature. I've created four to six letter "quick key" combos which result in commonly used names and phrases appearing in my Word docs. It is as easy as going into the "Tools" Menu, going to "AutoCorrect Options," putting your quick key combination in the left box and the result you want in the right box. Instructions are here and here. And instructions for duplicating, transferring, or copying those lists are here.

gTranslate

Right click translations for anything highlighted in Firefox. Hard to beat for Language Learners or anyone trying to globalize a curriculum.

Graph-Calc

A complete graphing calculator for free, but that isn't what's great. What's great is that students who struggle to get maths written properly can simply grab the screen from Graph-Calc and paste it - calculations and/or graphs - right into a word processing document for homework, classwork, or tests.

- Ira Socol

a post worth reading from Unlocking The Classroom - The Surge Against First Graders - this goes well with the debate at Ms. Mercer's Blog on colonialism, and the link between how neo-conservatives treat the world, and treat children other than their own.
(original Huffington Post article)

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

New! Digital version available through lulu.com

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Social Justice and Me

On Saturday I got tested.

I didn't want to do this, but the last reports that I have "documenting my disability" are over ten years old, and in the American social justice system, you need to prove you're "still a retard" far more often than that. After all, you might have "gotten smarter" in the intervening time. Not just me, of course, Americans want to re-certify blind people every few years ("haven't been to Lourdes lately, have you?") and those who cannot walk or those who have had a limb amputated. In the United States being humiliated once is never good enough, you need to do it periodically, to prove consistently your distance from normal, and then, if you fight hard enough, you'll be eligible for some basic human rights.

This is one of those things which proves America's commitment to equality.

I didn't want to do this, as I said, but a friend convinced me that I should at least, "have this report available." I'm in a battle with the university I attend regarding accommodations. This would be laughable considering I'm attempting to get degree with "Special Education" in the title, if it were not true: If a professor who wears eyeglasses without any special doctor's note or any university approval, weren't telling me that access to a text-to-speech system was only available if I could prove current disability, and prove it to the right people, and then explain why I needed that specific accommodation, and then had that accommodation approved.

So I spent about 3-1/2 hours Saturday working through what I used to call the "You're still a retard test." I guess I still call it that. For those unfamiliar with these tests, or who may have forgotten, this battery of tests are all "tests to failure." That is, they always keep you trying something until you can't do it, and can't do it repeatedly. So it's fairly impossible to feel good at the end of this process no matter who you are, or what you accomplish. Although this time, this time I ran right through the whole box of putting the picture story in the right order on the IQ test (in order to prove a "learning disability" you have to prove that you are not just "cognitively impaired," after all). I got them all right. "I do love picture stories," I told my girlfriend later as I drank it off at the nearest pub. A minor victory.

Of course about 25 minutes of that 3-1/2 hours was spent huddled over my "spelling test" with the assessor, trying to determine what, if any, words I had spelled correctly. "What's this letter?" he kept asking. I'd have to think about it, try to remember what I had written. In the end I think he decided that my spelling was superior to that of at least 3% of the population in my age group. Another vast period was spent battling with reading assessments. Which, yes, I got through, and, yes, I think I gave appropriate responses to most of. It's just that it took me some absurd length of time to read two pages of text, and left me sweating and shaking.

"I can read." I've said that lots of times. "It's just slow and hard." Does that mean, I wish to ask this professor, that I get the solution I need? or not? After all, what if I could prove that he could see his office door from his desk without glasses? Would that mean he wouldn't be allowed to wear them?

"And," I said Saturday evening to my girlfriend, "I can spell." And I can. "Just not handwriting it, then I get all confused." But then I've come to depend on the wonders of spellcheck and especially the amazing word prediction of iTap on my mobile keyboard, because that allows me to concentrate on writing, just as the be-spectacled professor relies on his optometrist's art so he is not struggling every minute to turn a blur into something recognizable.

But I don't make the rules. He does. The US was not founded by dyslexics, but lots of those founding fathers wore eyeglasses. So eyeglasses are normal. Eyeglasses aren't technology. But what I need are "special accommodations." What I need is "technology."

What I do with these test results remains an open question. I truly have to doubt the value of a "Special Education" degree from a university that thinks the way this university does, and, as I said in my Retard Theory post, sometimes open rebellion is the more important act.

But either way, it is crucial to consider what my little battle is about. It is especially crucial because of the way some have objected to my posts on Not Getting to Universal Design and Retard Theory. People write to me and say, "It is just ignorance," or "it is just incompetence," or "teachers just don't have the time to learn," or even "you'd be in worse shape in some other countries." They cannot conceive that what is happening is intentional.

Of course those who can not bring themselves to see it this way have generally been handicapped (yes! got the word in!) by an American education or an Asian education system copied from the American "Empire." In the American education system no one, not even really at university, learns anything about power. Americans are not supposed to think about power, or to discuss it. Power - in American myth - flows naturally to those who deserve it. If you are powerless it is because you deserve to be powerless. Bring up Marx or Gramsci and you'll probably be burned at the stake.

But I will argue that this is all about power and the maintenance of power. Every single time a method becomes more important than an accomplishment in education it is a battle for hegemony. Insisting that I read ink-on-paper rather than in the way I'm comfortable with, or even making it extremely difficult to read 'my way' (or requiring that I be labelled 'pathological' in order to read 'my way') is exactly the same as the Brits requiring Indians and Irish to speak English (or Americans doing the same to the Navajo and Sioux), and it is done for exactly the same reasons - to demonstrate power, to prove the superiority of one group over another, to control, to preserve the privilege of a self-appointed elite.

And if you argue that you are "preserving standards" or "enforcing norms" or "ensuring equality" or even that you are "simply trying to help me learn the right way," you are, "taking up the white man's burden," as Kipling put it. You are doing nothing more than clinging to your own power in your own world of comfort.

"Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child."

Americans, of course, have no idea that this was written about the United States' brutal colonial war against the Philippines, just as they have little understanding that their special education programs, their KIPP academies, their Teach for America programs, etc. all come out of the same spirit - "If we could only make you just like us, you'd be just fine."

But of course we know the subtext, from Kipling to KIPP, "You'll never really be quite like us, poor chap, but just keep trying. That'll keep you busy, and you won't be likely to rebel."

- Ira Socol

There are some fascinating conversations going on "out here" regarding these issues right now:

You'll want to read Ms. Mercer's Blog and What Do They Need? Part II and Part III.
and Paul Hamilton on Toolbelt Theory.
and Schooling Inequality on normal. and Schmozzle on normal.

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

New! Digital version available through lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

Talking Universal Design

The Friday conversation at LD Live! was about The Drool Room, Universal Design, Technology in Schools, Equity, and Changing Education.

You can listen to it all right here.
http://odeo.com/show/19171643/4/download/InterviewWithIraSocol.mp3

Kevin Honeycutt was the fascinating second guest with host Melinda Pongrey.

and Ewan McIntosh has great notes on Stephen Heppell's talk at the Urban Learning Space in Glasgow on changing education. David Muir has different notes on the same.

- Ira Socol

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

New! Digital version available through lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

Words

"The people up there said it was fascinating meeting you," she said. "Yeah?" I asked. "They said you suggested all kinds of things that they'd never thought of." "They're not good at looking." "No," she said, "they just don't know." "No, I guess they don't."

"Anyway," she continued, "one of them asked..." Her voice trailed off. Then she changed the subject. "What did one of them ask?" I asked.

It took three days to get the answer. "OK," she gave in. "One of them asked if you were Aspergers." "Maybe," I said. "Maybe I am." "Don't let it it get to you," she told me. "It isn't getting to me," I said, though it was. You work so hard on your "normal mask" at times, it's mighty frustrating when it doesn't work. "It isn't getting to me," I said again, "I have no idea where that line is and I don't give a f***."

Retard.

"You have many cutting edge provocative ideas. However, I am saddened that you could not find a way to express yourself without using offensive vocabulary. I believe you need to know how to effectively speak without hurting others and reinforcing myths and stereotypes. Please read Kathie Snow's article on People First Language, which can be found on her Disability is Natural website at www.disabilityisnatural.com. Thank you." - Anne Eason commenting on my May Day: Retard Theory post.

I told Anne that I didn't want to use "people first" language, which has always sounded 'diagnostic' to me. I'm not a "person with dyslexia" or whatever other 'diseases' certain powers that be decide that I have. When I get sick in winter I might be a "person with the flu." I have been, for example, "the patient with the severe allergic reaction." But my dyslexia, my attention 'issues,' whatever - those are not maladies that I "have." Those are identities which society has given me by declaring that I am not like them. So, just as I would not be "a person with Irishness," or perhaps, "a person with blackness (Africanness?)," I am not "a person with a disability." These terms are identity descriptors, existing because white, Protestant, male, heterosexual, normal people do not want to share their identity with me. So, if that label is so important to them, I will put that label first, thank you. Their slur becomes my badge of honor.

"[W]hat you are actually doing is perpetuating use of the word and presenting it as being OK for others to call you that since you are calling yourself "retard". It is not OK. It has been and continues to be a long hard battle to stop the use of this word. The people that want it stopped are the people who have been labeled and teased, the people who love them and the people who know it is wrong to talk to people like that. I understand where you are coming from, but what you are actually doing is perpetuating the use of the word toward the very people you want to stop labeling. I think that experience, which will come with time, will change your thinking." - anonymous commenting on my May Day: Retard Theory post.

I told anonymous that experience had brought me right to where I am now. I told her that I thought "Retard Theory" was as important an idea as "Queer Theory" and "Crip Theory." That the use of "that kind" of term was just as important. Of course, commenting on the same post Dave Hingsburger said, "Maybe this argument would work if the word applied to 'you' then it would have more power. Crip theory is often used by those with physical disabilities. 'Retard' refers to a specific population, I am guessing it's a population to which you do not belong. You cannot claim use of this word - it ain't yours." But damn, even if Dave doesn't want me to have the word, even if I wouldn't generally be described as having an "intellectual disability," or a "cognitive impairment" or whatever of those diseases people want to embrace, well... Dave, people don't say, "you can't read," to make fun of people like me and they don't say, "you can't sit still in class," and they don't say, "you have trouble with the rules of human interaction." They say, "retard." And they mean it.

Words have power, we either choose to own them or we choose not to.

"It has been and continues to be a long hard battle to stop the use of this word. The people that want it stopped are the people who have been labeled and teased, the people who love them and the people who know it is wrong to talk to people like that." anonymous said. But the word, well, there are lots of words...

And lots of words get used lots of ways.

'"All the other children at my school are stupid. Ex­cept I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what, they are. I'm meant to say that they have learning difficulties or that they have special needs. But this is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties because learning to speak French or un­derstanding relativity is difficult and also everyone has special needs, like Father, who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put in his coffee to stop him from getting fat, or Mrs. Peters, who wears a beige-colored hearing aid, or Siobhan, who has glasses so thick that they give you a headache if you borrow them, and none of these people are Special Needs, even if they have special needs.

'"But Siobhan said we have to use those words because peo­ple used to call children like the children at school spaz and crip and mong, which were nasty words. But that is stupid too because sometimes the children from the school down the road see us in the street when we're getting off the bus and they shout, "Spe­cial Needs! Special Needs!" But I don't take any notice because I don't listen to what other people say and only sticks and stones can break my bones and I have my Swiss Army knife if they hit me and if I kill them it will be self-defense and I won't go to prison."' - Mark Haddon. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003. pp 43-44)

Here's the thing, for Anne, and Dave, and Anon, and anyone else who came through that post, objected, but didn't comment. If what you are fighting is "the word" all you will accomplish - if you win - is that the kids will "shout, "Spe­cial Needs! Special Needs!"' instead. And then, just as with "colored" and "negro" in US race relations, you'll have to unteach your new words.

That doesn't mean I want you to stop trying to get people to stop using "retard" that way, just as clearly identified gay activist groups would sure rather people stopped using, "that's so gay" as a general insult. But I do mean that if you accept the way "disability" is defined, if you accept the "medical model of disability," if you accept that diagnosis leads to accommodation rather than the idea that individual human rights leads to choices - If you participate in those systems without fighting them every day - your efforts regarding the word are worthless, because while you might change the word, you won't change the idea.

As for me, I want to take the word and "queer" it, as I want to take the idea of "normal" and queer that. As I want to use language, use argument, use action to make people doubt what they know - everything they know - about the ideas of disability and difference and human norms. It's this idea, taking the short bus and making it into a monster truck and using it to break down the walls.

Yes, words matter, and words can insult and hurt. And words can also have remarkable power when we own them, when we use them in ways our enemies don't expect, or in ways which teach new ways of seeing.

So, Dave, maybe I don't "qualify" by your diagnostic standards, or maybe I do, as some who've met me think. But I not only don't care what side of which of your arbitrary lines I lie on, I don't think the lines are real at all. I think the lines are your problem, and shouldn't be mine or anyone else's. And if upsetting a few people with a few words will help get people to listen to that argument, I'll use those words.

"I'm not following a plan written by a retard undergrad," the reported statement of a university administrator at one of my undergraduate institutions, responding to a "non-diagnostic" campus accessibility plan I had written.

Late addition: two other opinions on language and disability
From Diary of a Goldfish: The Language of Disability
From Wheelchair Dancer: On Making Argument: Disability and Language

- Ira Socol

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

New! Digital version available through lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

Changing Education?

"It didn't take me very long after I started teaching to become aware (nobody at [Teachers College] ever helped me to become aware) that there were plenty of students who could learn, but not necessarily what I wanted them to learn and how I wanted them to learn it, that there were cultural differences that I didn't understand but needed to and then figure out what to do with those new understandings--not a simple matter in the 19th century schoolroom."

I was really, really lucky as a student. I had one of those "best five teachers in the country" step into my life in adolescence. And though that didn't make things easy - it is many, many years later and I still hate school and know that, for me as for probably a large majority of all students, it is the wrong way to try to study things - he did give me the space and time to start to figure out what my learning process was, and what kind of environments supported that process.

I think of him as a life-saver in many ways. Without him there would probably have never even been a high school diploma, and that would have limited many possibilities.

So when he recently emailed me the statement above, I did a lot of thinking about it. And I reflected on the ways we still discuss education, and why we cannot ever seem to come up with a structure for education in the United States which works for more than one third of the students.

Then I read this joke from Barry Bachenheimer, commenting on Karen Janowski's blog:

A man is walking his dog and encounters a friend. He tells his friend that he taught his dog to sing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star". The friend is incredulous and asks the dog to sing. "Come on Fido, sing." The dog is silent. The friend says again "Come on Fido, let's hear Twinkle Twinkle..." The dog remains silent.

The friend then says "I thought you said you taught your dog to sing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star"?"

The man says "I did. He just didn't learn it."

Here's the thing - there are lots of metaphors for the way education is perceived in the US, and they are all pretty accurate. 1. Education follows the "Industrial Model," and has since the late 19th Century and (at least) the Committee of Ten report. Education is roughly akin to a stamping plant. Raw material enters at kindergarten, perceived as essentially all the same. Repeated applications of pressure steadily transform this raw material into a value-added product which can be used in an industrial economy. If one piece of raw material fails to properly transform it is because it is inherently flawed (disabled or "bad") and it is plucked from the assembly line and dumped in the reject bin. 2. Education follows the "Missionary Model," and has at least since the Puritans began "public" schooling around Massachusetts Bay in the 17th Century. "The Church" (Society) sends out "missionaries" (teachers) to convert the "heathens" (children) into good, solid, obedient, Christian, white people who will work consistently and not trouble society. If the conversion fails to take it is because the heathen (child) was born on the wrong side of John Calvin's pre-destination divide. In this case "separation from the body of the church" is the best solution. 3. Education is "Political Indoctrination," not really any different in the US than it might be in Cuba or was in the old Soviet Union. The purpose of education is the creation of loyal, compliant citizens who will fill the roles in society which must be filled. Learning to follow instructions and a schedule, learning to pledge allegiance and respect authority, learning to sit down and shut up are not some "hidden curriculum," this is the curriculum. If a student fails to comfortably assume these compliant qualities it is because they are criminals, and must be treated as such.

And with each of these models - all of which we can directly see represented in national policies such as No Child Left Behind and in the research theories embraced by the American Educational Research Association - comes the idea of education as a "delivery system." Education - curriculum - will be "delivered" to students. If there is a failure in the delivery, it is the failure of the recipient first and foremost - they were not home for the delivery, or were not ready for it, or were unprepared to bring it into their house. Or, to a lesser extent, it might be a failure of the delivery "person." They didn't ring the doorbell enough, or did not knock loudly enough, or they were too slow doing other things and didn't have enough time for their whole route. Either way, of course, no one actually questions what is being delivered, or to whom. The only thing at issue is the process.

On Alice Mercer's blog she is asking "What do they need?" And that is the unasked question. Because Americans think lots of people are the "customer" in the educational process - the society, the business community, the economy itself, maybe even the parents - but they almost always fail to identify the actual customer: the student.

And it is only by identifying the student as the customer that education can be changed. What does the student need? How can what the student needs be offered, most effectively, to that student? When does the student need what they need? It is those questions which will shift the problem from the student, and to a significant extent, the teacher, and put it where it belongs, on the very system, on the very conception of education as we know it. After all, empowered students and empowered teachers could work wonderfully together if they had both the freedom and the resources they needed to work together effectively as collaborators. That relationship would not demean the teacher at all - it makes the teacher the professional expert of incalculable value. And it would not demean the student - who becomes an active participant in learning and actively responsible for learning.

To go back to the top, my old teacher said, "there were plenty of students who could learn, but not necessarily what I wanted them to learn and how I wanted them to learn it." That teacher decided that the system was at fault, not the student. And he worked tirelessly to create an alternative to that system - which he eventually did. An alternative that, as I said, I still consider a "life-saver." But all around us the blame when students can't or do not want to learn what we want them to, as we want them to, when we want them to, falls on the students, and on the teachers caught in the middle.

So change who you think the customer is, and you may get the change you need.

- Ira Socol

Alan Shapiro (that "one of the five best teachers") on Education:
History: The Disenchanting Instrument of Recall
The Plagiarism Perplex
Teaching and Critical Thinking
The Essential Skill of Crap-Detecting
Teaching on Controversial Issues
Thinking Critically About Internet Resources
How to Stop Cheaters

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

New! Digital version available through lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

Accessible Materials

"...another part of our strategy is to push for an accessibility policy from the university. That we would commit to ensuring that all 'internal' material (handouts, course material, reports, student publications etc etc) would be available in accessible format simultaneously. As one of my colleagues in Trinity College Dublin said recently, why can't this stuff, which is already on someone's hard drive, be made available?" - Enda Guinan, NUI Maynooth.

Last fall a faculty member sent me a PDF document to read. Perhaps you have seen documents like this. It was an "image only" scan of a copy of a copy of a copy of an article that had been written on by a note-taking reader at some point long ago. I opened it up in Acrobat Reader. Looked under the "Document" menu. Went to "Accessibility Quick Check." Noticed that this "Document contains only images." Cursed. Opened WYNN, tried scanning the document in through the Freedom Import Printer - the best tool I know of for forcing this kind of conversion, and got back a text file which looked like this:

fñJr?Íd *fP?rtmentali2f tí°« of knowledge components. Components of knowledge that are m fact interdependent are treated as being separable from each other. Learners develop mistaken SS m the

m^tTi Í rmP°neu * RdatedIy’Where kn0Wiedge «mP«««s do Lction md^endentt it un¡£2 h% C3Se that COnVCying relatIOI5shiPs ^«n then- conceptual structures woufd ad undemanding; these connections are not drawn, When components are interrelated, there » a £Se*y to

it°ne imkageriSCheme’there^ ^^representing the richness of interconnection m the iSnTaS narrow, doctrinaire viewpoints (see the problem of single representations).

¿¿SiUbSS^1011 °/^0Wí?ge- T*ÍSP”*»**** encoded u”d« a scheme dete external authority («*, a textbook) or a scheme which facilitates delivery and use. Knowledge is ’’ the learner The preemptive encoding is passively received by the learner, and^fuTbtnefitf

In one of my "angry moods," I sent the document back to the faculty member and said, "here's what the file you sent looks like to me, can we do something about this?"

Thankfully, this prof was one of the good guys. He was stunned (and I think a bit embarrassed). He asked me lots of questions. I think 30 emails went back and forth. I'm pretty sure that all of his class materials are accessible these days.

But that is not always the reaction.

Listen - given a reasonably accessible document text becomes accessible freely for most students who need different formats, and quickly available for the others. Give me a basic document in Microsoft Word and - at zero cost - I can have it read to you by Natural Reader (free) or you can paste it into a Google Doc (free) and read it with Click-Speak (free) or FireVox (free), or I can simply add WordTalk (free) into Word and you can read it right there. Or you can convert it into a Microsoft Reader (free) E-book and give it to the student in a form that combines text-to-speech with each-word-as-it-is-read-highlighting, with notetaking (or test answer), and bookmarking capabilities. I can use NaturalReader to make it an mp3 or I can go to SpokenText and do the same. And if I need at 'not-free' level of support, I can easily grab it and paste it into WYNN, or use it with Read-and-Write, or convert it to Braille.

If I have an accessible Acrobat Document I can simply ask the (free) Read-Aloud feature in Adobe Reader 8.x to read it out loud. And with the actual Acrobat Pro software I can take it apart into text, or, as I've suggested above, I can scan it "internally" using the import printers in full literacy-support packages or using an OCR program such as OmniPage (a fine version of which comes free with most Canon Scanners, including the very inexpensive "backpackable" LiDE scanners which simply run off the USB power from your laptop).

But those are not the ways people in education seem to want to deliver materials.

A couple of weeks ago I picked on US textbook publisher W.W. Norton for going out of their way to make even their digital textbooks worthless to those who struggle with print. Norton seems to have worked overtime to block accessibility - and let us be clear, that is what they did. They began with a perfectly acceptable text-file, and probably spent a year guaranteeing that many students could not use it.

Not everyone goes at it with the same intent, but by this point in 2008, I no longer care about supposed intent. By this point everyone in education should know that materials need to be accessible - if they don't, they have chosen to remain ignorant. And by this point every educational organization should both know how to create, and be committed to creating, fully accessible materials - if they don't they are - to quote Karen Janowski on the wider topic of Universal Design - guilty of educational malpractice.

So, everything should be accessible, as we said at the start. Is there a model for doing this?

The first step seems obvious. You begin with everything created or purchased starting today. Every teacher, professor, administrator, librarian, staff member, and supplier of academic materials to the district must know how to make every document they make accessible and must have a system to check that with when they are not sure. Text documents, books, PowerPoint Presentations (be sure to have PowerTalk on hand), PDFs, websites, they all have to either be created fully accessible or have fully accessible alternatives which arrive simultaneously. (Note: this includes "effective" informational alt. tags on every image in every document, PDF, and website - if you are not doing that, you have not even started, so a great place to start analysing your accessibility capacity is to start surveying your faculty and staff, asking, do you alt. tag. every image?) For website access - check out these posts from jamessocol.com

What about those books? First, every textbook purchased must come with a fully accessible digital version usable in a variety of alternate formats. If the publisher will not give you this, do not buy the book. Second, for all other books, ask for a digital format right when you buy it (most likely if you are buying quantities or ordering quantities for your university bookstore), but if there is not a digital version - make one before the first book is sold, or handed to a student, or stuck on a library shelf. Scan it with an OCR system, and store that file so students who need it can get it quickly and easily.

Those should be absolute rules from today on, but what about all the old stuff? (because your school, university, government has chosen to ignore this issue for the past decade)
At the California State University system (the world's largest university1), the Accessible Technology Initiative is now entering its third year. I'm not holding Cal State up as "the best people around." Don't get me wrong. CSU is thinking about these things ahead of most universities only because they were successfully sued repeatedly by their own students for violating Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 - which requires equal access to "information and communication" at any school or university in the United States which receives even one dollar (that's € 0.64 or £ 0.51 today) of federal funds (this includes federal or federally-guaranteed grants or loans to students).

Let me quote from their statements:

"Instructional Materials (IM) are considered to be forms of communication and must therefore be delivered in a manner that is equally effective for persons with disabilities. Communication is considered to be equally effective when it is:

• comparable in quality to those received by students without disabilities
• comparable in timeliness of delivery and availability
• provided in a manner and medium appropriate to the significance of the message and the abilities of the person receiving the material"

then they created a set of parameters:

"Each campus is directed to adopt and submit an Instructional Materials Accessibility Plan (IMAP) no later than June 15, 2007. The plan should address, at a minimum, the specific actions to be taken by the campus for the following areas:

• Timely adoption of textbooks by faculty
• Ensuring textbook selection/ordering for courses with late-hired faculty
• Early identification of students with disabilities who require modified instructional materials
• Use of the campus learning management system both for delivering technology-enabled course content, and for posting syllabi and instructional materials in both traditional and hybrid courses
• Incorporation of accessible ... procurement requirements when purchasing instructional materials (e.g. transcripts for audio, captions for videos)
• Alignment of academic technology resources to assist faculty in the creation of technology-enabled courses
• Communication and training processes to educate students, staff, and faculty about the campus IMAP (Instructional Materials Accessibility Plan)
  
• Identification of specific roles and responsibilities for responsible parties
• Identification of an evaluation process (including milestones and timelines) to measure the effectiveness of the plan"

and then they created a timeline, including very specific targets:

"Fall Term 2008: New courses and new course content, including instructional materials and instructional websites, will be designed and authored in a manner that incorporates accessibility. If incorporating accessibility is not possible or would constitute an undue burden, then a plan to provide an equally effective alternate form of access must be developed, documented, and communicated. Existing course content will be made accessible at the point of course redesign or when a student with a disability enrolls in the course.

"Fall Term 2012: Instructional materials and instructional websites for all course offerings will be accessible. Once again, undue burden plan requirements (as described above) apply."

No, you can't accomplish this overnight, but you can develop strategies. What if books were scanned with OCR systems as they were returned to the library. Can't do them all? Just do 10% of those returned each day, or 1%, or 0.001%, or just a single book everyday. It won't be quick, but combined with the new book policy, you'll be moving forward, not backward. (and remember, you don't have to do the million or so books already on Project Gutenberg, Gutenberg Australia, UVA, Fordham, etc., as long as you know where these are and how to quickly direct students to them). What if every department was responsible for converting any non-accessible PDFs to accessibility each semester before they could be used in coursework? Slowly, you'd be cutting through your massive backlog.

You can't really claim to be educating all of your students if academic (and school life) materials are not all accessible. So write your plan down, and get yourself started.

- Ira Socol

1 - and it helps, that the word "accessible" - with its many meanings, appears right up-front on the Cal State system's web home page - "The CSU is a leader in high-quality, accessible, student-focused higher education. With 23 campuses, almost 450,000 students, and 46,000 faculty and staff, we are the largest, the most diverse, and one of the most affordable university systems in the country."

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

US $16.00 direct via lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

May Day: Retard Theory

Start here: If your school, university, business, government requires "proof of disability" - that is, diagnosis - before providing accommodations, it is discriminating, and it is not committed to social justice, not committed to equality of opportunity, not committed to the success of every student.

It is as simple as that.

The implication behind accommodation through diagnosis is that the accommodation is "cheating" or providing some kind of "unfair advantage." And that means that those who need to use those alternate methods are permanently seen as lesser human beings - Children of a Lesser God - in one of my favorite descriptive phrases.

On this Blogging Against Disablism Day that is what I think needs to be said, and said loudly, and said continually, because very few understand this, or want to think about this - hell - very few in the Special Education Department at my university can comprehend this issue - and even fewer are willing to try to do anything about it, and unless the link between diagnosis and accommodation is broken (which is a link between pathology and sympathy, not humans and rights), progress will never get us where we want to go.

Because, obviously, if accommodations were not "cheating," were not offering "unfair advantage," everyone would be able to use them. Just as everyone gets to use all the "assistive technologies" everybody uses: cars (are you "able" to walk to your job 15 miles from your house each day?), elevators (are you able to get to your 27th floor office via the stairs every day?), ladders (can't reach that? must be something wrong with you), power tools (what? you can't saw 50 pieces of lumber accurately by hand this morning? you a cripple or something?), even those books which mean that dumb, lazy "normal readers" don't have to remember everything.

Retard Theory

So it is time to say it, and say it every day. There is no normal. There is no normal way to read, or to write, or to listen, or to see, or to get from here to there. There are simply ways of doing things, and the ways which work best for each human individual will vary - based in human capability and human desire and human preference. And it is in individual choice that technique decision making must be based - not the diagnosis that I, or you, or we, are the victims of some pathology which infantilizes us.

This is why I argue every day for Universal Design, and this is why I recently refused accommodations from my university, when they wanted "proof of disability." "I won't," I said, "I know you'll think this is political grandstanding, and it is political grandstanding, but my opposition to this is at the core of why I am here."

Forty years ago this May the students, and eventually, many of the workers of France took on the French government in legendary protests against a state ruled by too many rules and too many norms. They may have been beaten in the streets by the cops, and tear-gassed, and arrested. They may have lost the big battles, that "third Napoleon" - Charles DeGaulle - remained in power, but French society was transformed forever. As one participant in those events put it - responding to French President Sarkozy's claim that the spirit of 1968 "must be liquidated," - '“As a divorced man, Sarkozy couldn’t have been invited to dinner at the Élysée Palace, let alone be elected president of France,” Mr. Geismar said. "Both the vivid personal life and political success of Mr. Sarkozy, with foreign and Jewish roots, “are unimaginable without 1968.”' (That's not unusual, we all know that African-American US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas would have voted to preserve slave owner rights if he had been there for the Dred Scott Decision, and we all know "disabled" leaders who fight hard to preserve the old system because they believe they are somehow special for overcoming it.)

Sometimes a system - even a comfortable one - is stifling, discriminating, destroying. And so even if you now get every accommodation you need, you are being crushed if diagnosis is required to get them. Because the only reason "they" are giving you those accommodations is because they think you are "sick," because they "feel sorry for you," because they know that you are not equal to "them." If they did not think those things - these solutions would not be accommodations - they would be rights and choices.

I'm not saying that you need to follow me and throw things away for a political point. I have some kind of shot at surviving "unaccommodated." I really do. And - if not - I'll just do something else. My risk may be much less than yours.

But perhaps we have to "queer" the experience around us - use "Retard Theory" whenever we can. De-normalize "them." Demand to see the doctor's note from anyone wearing eyeglasses. Ask for a note from the cardiologist every time you see someone in an elevator. Challenge anyone who prints out a copy of a digitally-supplied text - "Did your doctor say you couldn't read a computer screen?"

Make "them" uncomfortable every day. They are willing to do it to us. So it must be "fair."

- Ira Socol

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

US $16.00 direct via lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

Planning for Access

It is about to be May, which means it is time to start considering how to ensure that your school, college, university is a place with true access next year.

The goal is equal access to information and communication, with equal meaning "at the same time," and "in the same place," and "in a form that is as usable," as the information and communication provided to any other student.

When Enda Guinan posted yesterday about Assistive Technology planning at NUI Maynooth, I thought, we all need to be asking these questions and making these plans.

Enda begins with the most important thought: "Next semester we will have TextHelp and Inspiration on every PC across the campus. As these are our most popular applications, I reckon that by mainstreaming their availability, the needs of a lot of students will be taken care of. Students with mild dyslexia for example won’t need to use the current ATC."

Exactly.

Years ago, at Grand Valley State University, I was asked if we wanted to develop specialized labs for our new AT applications. "No thanks," I told my boss, "I'm done with resource rooms, I want this stuff everywhere that everyone else gets to access computers." And last week, on Karen Janowski's blog, I noted that education for those with "special needs" will never get better until "regular education" gets better. "Regular education should be able to include, and foster success and independence for, perhaps 98% of students," I said, responding to her call for better supports in every school.

So Enda's step one should be everyone's step one. Every computer in your school, on your campus, should have the basic tools. Whether you install Text-Help's Read-and-Write or Freedom Scientific's WYNN is your preference, I think highly of both literacy support packages but think that your choice will largely depend on what else you are installing (Read-and-Write does more things, WYNN does fewer things with a some stronger supports). But your school needs one of these highly-supportive literacy solutions everywhere (network "concurrent use" licenses are available for both). Dyslexia and other print disabilities represent up to 80% of the "disabled" students in any school population, and weak readers who could benefit from these tools as well, may include as many as many as two-thirds of your students. In addition, word-highlighting text-to-speech systems seem to have significant positives for students with attention issues. Inspiration is another "everywhere" solution. Writing support is essential if the students currently not succeeding are to succeed, and Inspiration is a proven, inexpensive solution.

But those "cost-to-purchase" products should only be part of what is installed everywhere. Your computers must have all "that free stuff" that both builds access and teaches students (and faculty) that supportive technology is everywhere.

Start with Firefox, properly equipped, on every computer. The properly equipped means that FireVox (the blind browser support) and CLiCk-Speak (the dyslexic browser support) are installed, as are right-click dictionaries (US) and spellcheckers (UK) and g-Translate. (You can add the dictionary switcher as well.)

Then make sure the other free text-to-speech solutions are available: WordTalk, NaturalReader, MicrosoftReader (be sure to add Text-To-Speech engine, dictionaries, and RMR conversion tool for MS Word), and PowerTalk for PowerPoint. Zero Dollars, or Euros, or Pounds - but massive impacts for your students.

For screen magnification, iZoomWeb is free, effective, though it works only while you are online in Microsoft Internet Explorer. For low-dexterity keyboarding support - Click-N-Type, the world's best on-screen keyboard is also completely free.

And make sure that Ghotit is prominently displayed in your Firefox bookmark toolbar, so that dyslexic students and English-language-learners have a spellcheck system which works for them.

Another essential online support for your students are Google Accounts. With Google Accounts they will have Google Docs, and the ability (for free, including at home) for CLiCk-Speak to read back their writing to them as they edit, and the ability to collaborate on shared writing. They will also have Google Notebook, and Google Calendar, both of which support both life and academic organization.

And one more thing - those boxes of alternative keyboards and mice, and ready-to-grab headsets. (see this hardware post)

OK, that's the "everywhere" stuff, but as Enda points out, you need two other support centers. You need a place where students can experiment, learn, screw up, that's private enough to keep the costs of failure low, and thus encourage risk-taking. And that learning lab can double as a low-incidence disability support centre, with less "typical" software and hardware, like JAWS and Braille printers, Zoom-Text or MAGic, and AAC tools and switch devices.

And you need a place, and a program, of faculty training and support. Just as students need a place to safely play, experiment, and learn, so do teachers and professors. This space needs to double as a materials accessibility lab, where everything from PDF accessibility to website accessibility to captioning is as simple and easy as possible. If it is not, your delivery system will be ineffective because the teaching materials are likely to remain inaccessible.

If your school is not set up as above, you have a long summer of work ahead of you. Not having accessible ICT is the same as not having accessible entries or accessible toilet facilities. Or maybe it is worse, since the very purpose of the school is the transmission of information, and if some students are denied the fair access to that, there's no reason for those students to come to the school at all.

- Ira Socol

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

US $16.00 direct via lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

Culture and comprehension

Americans report sport scores in the wrong way. If a person from almost any other nation looks at the score of an American game in progress they will assume that the visiting team is the home team and will be wrong in their assumptions regarding the stadium and city they are seeing. I have seen this create difficulties and misconceptions. It's a tiny thing but it begins to explain the enormous problems faced by educators who refuse to embrace the idea of differentiated instruction and instruction based in, or at least accepting of, the culture of the individual learner.

Ever watch the faces of confused learners - or a confused audience? Ever notice that, at first, all of their cognitive effort is being expended on jamming that square peg into that round hole? Maybe you are more familiar with what happens next - they give up, seek distraction, or check out.

A few months ago I threw a statement out to a list-serve of international students during a debate on precision and language in academic discourse. I had been arguing for writing which might best be understood by multiple audiences, and others had been arguing for the perfect precision of subject-specific and audience-specific academic language. So I said, "That lad's got the sliotar just exploding off the hurley."

I said that this statement was absolutely precise. Just about anyone in Ireland - or many New York neighborhoods - would understand immediately, and that the precision "was important," that a sliotar is not a baseball or a lacrosse ball and a hurley is not a tennis racquet or a lacrosse stick. But, I wondered, if I had a room of students, half well versed in Gaelic games and half not, that if it would not be a good idea to make the information reasonably available to both groups, and maybe to the subset of students who know nothing of sports at all.

Because, if we don't do that, some students become unfairly privileged, some will waste much of the cognitive effort we want them to use on "the learning" simply trying to handle our language, and others will give up.

How technology can help

So what if - almost effortlessly - you could solve this? What if fans could choose to see their football scores either on USA Today - home teams listed last (the American tradition that comes from baseball's structure of innings) - or on Guardian.com - home teams listed first? What if any student in the sliotar discussion could instantly type sliotar into Wikipedia and link to "Hurling" and quickly access enough information to understand my sentance? What if a student could even hear "sliotar" being pronounced during the radio broadcast of a match? What if students trying to figure this out could dig through their choice of information sources, such as the GAA site, or a YouTube glimpse of the sport?



Or what if students, faced with the question of "what is normal?" had a quick chance to look at global newspaper websites to determine whether most people followed the "home team first" or "home team last" principle?

Cognitive load, and engagement

The role of the technologies - as used above - is twofold. First, it becomes a seamless accommodation, allowing learners with "lesser" levels of access to the curriculum to rapidly "catch up." Don't know those Hurling terms? Not sure which team is home? You can, if you are brave enough, stop the class and ask, but with contemporary technologies you can find it out yourself, and you can make those connections in the way that best serves your own needs. Second, it offers personal engagement, allowing the student to interact with the information in a personally-directed way as the group interaction runs in parallel.

This not some distraction via multi-tasking. This is human learning. It can only be seen as a distraction if you perceive education as a one-way transmission system. It can only be understood as "multi-tasking" (in some bad way) if you think that, while driving, one should only be looking continually straight ahead out through the windshield. (Of course we all know teachers and drivers who do believe these things.)

If, on the other hand, you understand that learning is something which occurs individually, and that it happens best when new data can be linked effectively with the learner's own brain, and if you understand (or admit) that outside of school the human brain handles a flood of different inputs on a continuous basis (we can be both cold and hungry, we can know both that we are walking toward home and that the billboard up ahead has changed, we can understand both that it is about to rain and consider the range of places of shelter up ahead which we can run to and still be concerned with finding the right present for that girl's birthday), you will immediately see the advantages of using technology to expand how students interact with incoming information.

Universalizing

This is not about "disability," at least not if you define "disability" as narrowly as schools define "learning." "Disability" in school terms is a line in the sand which separates the "normal" from the "pathological."

Eyeglasses are fine in any classroom, and books are rarely set in 4 point type, because up to a certain point schools understand that not everyone sees perfectly. But if you are one step out of that "normal" range then schools call you "disabled" and getting help gets much harder. You need not be able to 'speedread' in school, but below a certain rate and you are off to the 'resource room.' You need not be from a wealthy family, but if your parents have not given you the proper white, middle-class social skills, you will be unwelcome in most classrooms.

But I can disable anyone, anytime. I can talk about things which they have no background knowledge of, and act as if they should know. I can put them in a place where they do not understand the language. I can schedule class on the 20th floor and turn off the elevator. I can whisper rather than speak in a normal voice. I could apply British spelling rules (and grade spelling) with American students or apply American spelling rules (and grade spelling) with British students. I could offer a required course only from 2:00 am to 3:30 am, or I could require all students to stand up through the whole class, or class could be held out on the street in a neighborhood that might make every middle class student feel completely uncomfortable. I could even, socratically, refuse to allow books or written notes and demand memory only.

Does that sound ridiculous to you? Maybe, but none of those are any more ridiculous than the typical rules of the classroom feel to any of us who are "different" in dozens of different ways. Your rules mess with our cognitive processes by forcing us to waste energy catching up physically, or culturally, or in terms of communications systems.

Let's go back to the start. Americans report sports scores in a reverse format from the rest of the world. We can either stress out all American sports fans by forcing them to change (or we could, I suppose, force everyone else to change under threat of Bush invasion or Clintonian "obliteration"), or we can explain the difference and allow each group to see these scores their own way via flexible technology. We can expect every student to understand what we are talking about as if they were clones of the teacher, or we can stop and condescendingly explain every thing in our own way (or spoon feed it if we think the student is disabled), or we can use and teach the technologies of differentiated instruction in ways which build engagement and independence.

- Ira Socol

great blog comment of the week: On Inside Higher Ed - On Texts, Tech and Teens: "Come to think of it, what is so wrong with emoticons in writing? In a way, they are simply invented punctuation marks. In another way, they are visual additions to writing. Writing (in the Western world)has had many visual additions through the ages, such as ornate capitals in medieval manuscripts, modern typefaces (which convey meaning!) and poems that take a certain shape. I don’t use them because I think they are hokey, but maybe that’s because my vocabulary of emoticons is limited." - Grocheio, Asst VP Planning and Institutional Effectiveness at Shorter College. What a great statement! Are emoticons more or less annoying than e.e. cummings lack of upper case letters? I think of Robert Ferlinghetti's poem Fortune (actually "7" from A Coney Island of the Mind) - one of the first modern American poems I discovered, and think of how the arrangement of words on the page added meaning beyond the words alone. Aren't emoticons the same thing?

great blog post of the day: Technoshock of the Digital Immigrant at Paragraph City. I think it's a wonderful parallel tale of what I have told above - just more coherently written.

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

US $16.00 direct via lulu.com

Look Inside This Book