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was talking with a friend about it this morning and I realized that the public education system failed me, a blind student, in a lot of ways, so here is a thread compiling my remembered experiences of ablism and downright shitty teaching from kindergarten through 12th grade
I should start this out by saying that until my sixth grade year, my state was not legally required to provide braille to legally blind students. If a student could see at all, they could be encouraged or forced to read large print. this was the case for me until 2nd grade.
I was very lucky in a lot of ways. My parents started me learning braille before I even entered the public school system, and fought for its inclusion in my curriculum relentlessly from the moment I started. i’m pretty sure my teachers were afraid of my mom, honestly.
Braille is generally seen as less desirable than print, even if reading print for me was slow, challenging, and left me with eye strain and crippling headaches, which I occasionally still suffer from to this day.
I remember being forced to learn how to read and write in print, even if the letters I read and wrote were an inch or more tall, and took up more than two lines on a page of notebook paper.
it took me sometimes double the time it took my sighted counterparts to finish even the smallest assignments when doing them in print, but it was still seen as more desirable, because though it wasn’t easy, it was better than appearing blind.
I could write an entire paper on the relationship I had with the word blind growing up. The way my parents taught me it wasn’t bad, but the people around me only spoke the word in whispers like it was some thing to fear, something disgusting.
I quickly learned that being blind was synonymous with being broken, being a tragedy, being different. my teachers taught me this. i could not control my vision, but I remember wishing I could.
I could see out of one eye, and that eye did not have what one would call good vision. I could see colors, facial features, etc, but eye colors, words on T-shirts, I could never quite make those out. i had a fondness for slow paced games, because then I could follow what was +
happening on the screen. Trying to focus on anything for too long made my head hurt.
I definitely remember eye doctors appointments where I would lie about being able to see whatever I was supposed to see, in hopes that it would make the doctor say I was getting better, because i never wanted to be “blind” not when my teachers said the word like a death sentence.
again, I have to reiterate that I was lucky. I had support from my parents, when a lot of blind children receive this type of stuff from family, and, teachers.
these first few years of my education had a very lasting effect on my personal view of my disability.
eventually, I started receiving more braille and less print. I still used print in my math classes though, until the day I went totally blind, halfway through my eighth grade year. there are a few things that happened before that, though.
for the entirety of elementary school, I participated in physical education classes maybe 40% of the time. things like stretches, jumping jacks, running in place. when the coach decided I couldn’t do something, i sat in a corner and twiddled my thumbs.
I was left out of visual exercises and games in pretty much every subject. If I made a list, we would be here all day.
everything was OK though right? Because once every two years or so, my class would have a unit on blindness, learning letters in braille or reading a book written by a blind person. I would get to answer everyone’s questions, because this was for me, right?
it didn’t matter that they were depending on me, a child, to teach my peers about my disability that I myself did not even understand at ages eight, nine, 10. of course not. I was meant to be grateful, because this was inclusion.
all bitterness aside, from the moment my peers realized I was fundamentally different from them in a way that all of the adults seemed to think was very important, the attitudes of my teachers spread to my classmates.
I was not someone to be friends with, someone to share secrets with. I was someone to pity, and spending time with me was a good deed, a sacrifice. my few friends were constantly praised for helping me because of course i needed help constantly.
i’m rambling, though, getting into more broad topics. Let’s focus on some specific incidents, moving onto junior high and high school.
in seventh grade, I had my first serious unit on geometry and three dimensional shapes. I was given plastic sheets with raised line pictures of these three dimensional shapes. These were incomprehensible to me.
feeling the lines, solid and dotted, that make up a three dimensional shape is very different from feeling the actual shape. an example of this would be a cone. Everyone knows what it feels like, but the lines of a cone look like a triangle with a squished oval on the bottom
The pictures that I was given just, were not clicking in my brain. my teachers assumed that this just meant I would never be able to understand three dimensional geometry. my mom said fuck that. so she bought me a set of plastic shapes, prisms, pyramids, etc.
once I had these shapes in my hands, and understood what exactly I was supposed to be learning, i aced every, single, fucking, assignment. if my mom hadn’t fought for that though, I would have never learned those concepts, concepts I would need later in my education.
unfortunately, there were several things like this that did end up slipping through the cracks, because my teachers thought the concepts were just to visual for me to ever understand properly. let me list a few of these
I never learned the structure of DNA. I skipped the entire unit on musculature in my anatomy and physiology class. To this day, I have the most bare-bones knowledge of geography ever, because maps were /so hard/ to obtain
some of this was lack of available resources. Some of this was laziness on the part of the district and my individual teachers. most of this was low expectations caused by ablism
I genuinely do not Think I would have passed several of my classes if my mother did not take time every evening to work on concepts that my teachers had given up on teaching me.
not to mention the fact that I tried to take my ACT every year from seventh grade up, and could not score a braille copy of it until my junior year. I was never a priority. what did my education really matter? I had to fight for so much in high school.
now let’s talk about a couple of incidents where things were said that were extremely ignorant and ablest in nature.
in ninth grade, the year after I went totally blind, I got the highest grade in my math class on a particularly difficult test.
I was ecstatic about this, until my math teacher wrote on the board next to a copy of my graded paper, if the blind student can ace this, so can you.
this was played off like a joke, but just think for a second about what that implies. If I can ace this, it must be easy right? Because I am blind. I can only do well if the subject matter is easy. this memory still makes my chest hurt, 5 years later.
my 10th grade year, my honors biology teacher was angry at the class for not doing the required reading. she decided to use me as an example.
“why don’t you read?” she asked A room full of 16-year-olds. “it’s not hard. I bet Eden would give anything to read like you all can” she said to my face, with my textbook of braille opened on the desk in front of me.
my response that I could read, and did read, perfectly fine, was met with “oh well you know what I meant. It’s not the same.” another assertion that the way I read was different, worse, harder, lesser.
these are two incidents that stuck in my mind so vividly I can tell you what the classroom smelled like in those moments. There are more, others, that weren’t so noticeable, things I learned to overlook, to expect.
I learned that my friends would always be seen as saints for taking time out of their day to talk to me. i learned that speaking about my disability was to be done in whispers. i learned that being blind, there were things I would just never understand.
I was accused of cheating when I made good grades by other students, and even by teachers, because how could I pass all of these tests with flying colors? I couldn’t, because I’m blind. this stuff is hard. I am not meant to be smart.
I learned that my teachers were not willing to teach me because I didn’t learn like other students. I learned that the administration wasn’t willing to work with me, because I was difficult.
my education wasn’t a priority, because what would I ever end up doing with my life anyway right? Why waste money? I was taught so many things in my classrooms, but rarely, were those things actually beneficial.
that’s the end of this thread for now, but shout out to my seventh grade English teacher and my 10th grade math teacher, my senior year history teacher and my drama teacher for most of high school. y’all were bright spots. 
