A student I was working with recently was looking disgruntled after a long day at school. So, I asked him about what was grinding his gears. He told me that in his third grade class that day they read a story about ADHD and it was about how even though ADHD was a disability, it was also a super power. I think we have all run across this book or some other book with the same theme. Seeing that I knew he was diagnosed with ADHD, I wondered what was bothering him about it specifically. He said quite frankly, “I don’t think my ADHD is a disability, but I also don’t think it’s a super power. I just want to be a regular kid with neither.”
As an educator, I have spent a lot of time trying to help kids normalize their labels, by both destigmatizing that label, while also trying to normalize the range of human behavior. I often ask questions like, “How could ADHD be a disability, if almost half of C-level executives and entrepreneurs claim to have it?” Or “If ADHD is a disability, why does it only rear it’s head in the classes you like the least?” The common feel-good answer is that it’s actually a superpower. But then, if it’s a superpower, why do schools identify it as a disability and provide supports for it? And why aren’t we identifying kids with this superpower and fostering their future potential?
Well in my mind, those answers are clear. Educational disabilities are the result of the interaction between learning preferences and the learning environment. If we were to provide accommodations in our methods to suit individual learning styles, then we’d likely not see the learning deficits we consider to be disabilities. A student with dyslexia only has a disability when they are forced to read/write, without the supports and assistive technology to help them. ADHD is only a disability when the expectations around focus and engagement are tailored to students with the ability to attend for longer periods of time (even if those kids are less likely to be a future CEO). Instead, we teach to the cookie cutter caricature of a student who we are fostering to thrive in the same biased approach in college. Ask a high school teacher why they assign certain nonsensical tasks (handwriting a ten page paper) and they will tell you that the students need to learn the skill for SATs or college writing exams…forgoing the connection to the real world. I get it, but that doesn’t make it not stupid.
What we’ve done is enshrined the Bell Curve in education; those above are gifted, those below are disabled. We use test scores and observations and checklists and hunches to provide names and labels for the outliers. If a child’s reading scores fall below a certain threshold or their ability to learn to read requires a different approach, we call it dyslexia, slap a label on the kid, and then try to empower them to rise above their disability. Yet there are kids who score or rate slightly better than the kid with dyslexia, so we tell them that they are normal, don’t provide any additional supports, and call them below average (read this to see my point).
So what was this third grader basically saying? “Don’t patronize me.” We see this sentiment throughout disability advocacy groups with phrases like, “I don’t want your pity”.* To label a child with a disability of our own creation and then do damage control by suggesting that it’s actually a superpower is about as patronizing and condescending as we can get as a species. I think what he was trying to say is that he just wants to be a student at the school with no pathologizing labels OR fabricated superpowers. He just wanted to be like everyone else; imperfect and doing his best.
*Shout out to the guys from Asperger’s R US (featured image) who I have been honored to get to know and live and breathe “who they are” without any apologies.