Trust students. Respect students. Give extensions, no questions asked, no doctor's note needed. Grade their learning. We do not know what students are surviving. We do not need to know what traumas, secrets, family turmoil might underlie and inspire their use of the word 'sick.' https://twitter.com/CarleighBaker/status/1199367829247496192

I stopped penalizing students for late assignments. Instead, I discuss the *reasons* for deadlines--to pace their learning, to contribute to the class, to pace my responses, which in turn aid their next work.

We learn as a community.

I now receive more assignments on time.

And what about the "real" world? Students bring their worlds to the classroom. This includes rape, forced migration, colonialism, genocide.

They don't need my punitive patronizing lessons on "realness."

They are commuting, balancing jobs, childcare, eldercare. They have disabilities and illnesses, some of which have not yet been sanctioned by the settler medical system (and I care about their experiences, their insight with and through struggle, not a diagnostic manual).

I honour specific requirements for disabilities, and receive and work with the paperwork, but I *centre disabled learning* as an intellectual and ethical framework, as a place of insight and resistance, rather than shuffle it to the individualizing and exceptional sidelines.

Finally, I speak directly about how to negotiate deadlines professionally in the so-called real world, or the worlds I inhabit, which includes fixed deadlines (for grants) & more flexible ones (publishing). How balance the requirements? How communicate when I cannot meet them?

Just today I spoke to students about my disability and why I disclose I have one (so that I can model for them that disabled teachers exist and thrive) and about why I choose not to say anything more specific, not in the classroom, not yet.

I simply said I needed them to think with me because I was having a hard day in terms of my disability, and in this way I mirrored that human weakness is welcome in my classroom and that thought is something *we do together.*

Disability can profoundly reveal this gift.