When the virus first broke, some schools initially deposited the whole idea of online instruction in the too-hard pile, hesitating to offer classes for any students rather than attempting to fulfill their legal and ethical obligations to serve all students, especially those with disabilities.

Clearly, if educators fail to attempt in good faith and to the best of their ability to serve all students, particularly those with disabilities, those students will suffer academically, emotionally, and socially. Perhaps less obviously, teachers will miss opportunities to transform themselves into better educators and people.

As I experienced it, teaching students with disabilities was like a 12-step program specially designed to transform me into a better teacher. The journey featured emotional highs and lows, prompted me to ask myself fundamental questions, and ultimately led me to a more profound understanding of oft-repeated truths about learning and life.

To explain my hopes and fears at the moment, I’ll share some of my experiences working with students with disabilities. In this post, I’ll tell you about Diego, whose name and some small other personal details I’ve changed for his privacy, who taught me that…

Everyone Has Strengths

Diego’s daily uniform was a polo shirt with top button fastened, jeans, dark sneakers, glasses. His sentences averaged one word in length. Although not particularly sad, I saw him nearly every day throughout his high school career as his advisor and only noticed him smile once or twice. 

By graduation, Diego read at a 4th grade level. His inability to grasp abstract concepts in math and history led our staff to modify tasks by making categories bigger. For example, I recall him attempting to establish a historical awareness by sorting events into those that happened before he was born (the invention of cars, his parents’ birth) and after he was born (his brother’s birth, his uncle’s wedding in Mexico).

Typical conversation:

One day in advisory, I sat next to him and asked whether he’d be willing to show me something he was working on.

After a world of sighs and crossed arms and tightly closed eyes, hoping, I’m sure, that I would disappear, Diego acquiesced and walked me through a house he’d designed in Google Sketchup. In the living room, perpendicular projectors cast a Minecraft landscape on two adjacent walls. Dogs entered via a specific and private entrance and accessed personal refrigerators with close-to-the-floor handles. Mysteriously: three doorbells.

After 15 seconds, before we even ventured upstairs, Diego emphatically snapped shut the laptop’s screen.

-That’s it, he said, that’s my house.

In one of his auto-biographical essays, the writer-neurologist Oliver Sacks describes a memory of his mother realizing her son possessed the ability to rotate 3-dimensional objects in his minds’ eye. She told him this was a crucial skill for surgeons, because they must visualize, sometimes without looking, the shapes and curves of organs, tissues, and bones while performing their dark art of mending.

I’d never thought much about this particular ability, but while reading the essay twenty years ago, I paused with my finger on the text, closed my eyes, and struggled to envision the features of my family members’ faces. Failing that, I tried and could bring to mind only the broad outlines of the neighborhoods where I’d spent most of my life. This reading was leading me to some understanding about myself and perhaps also about the world, but other than the sensation of my fruitless straining, I wasn’t sure what it was.

Are you able to do these things? Can you close your eyes and picture a beloved object, heft it, turn it on one axis and then another without losing it to the blur of darkness?

After he closed the laptop, I basically begged Diego to re-open it, finish showing me the house, and answer all my questions. He stared at my collar (he rarely looked others in the eye) without responding.

A strength I do have is the ability to wait silently, which I did.

He finally said, “I don’t need the computer. To the side of the cabinet are three speakers. The ceiling curves toward the floor in the corner, just past the end of the speaker.” He walked me through the house in mind-bending detail, describing with clinical precision each corner, feature, and room.

As he listed the furniture and it’s precise placement, my recognition of Diego’s particular ability harmonized with my reading experience many years prior.

Diego did not become a surgeon. But he does possess a special ability to envision spaces and objects in his mind. Probably his countless hours of playing Minecraft, coupled perhaps with innate ability, led to over-development in one dimension, like the swell of a punter’s kicking leg. 

I knew we could find ways to tap into this special strength. Diego could be a designer on project teams, he could plan the layout for exhibitions and school assemblies, he could develop number sense via geometry.

We did some of this while he was at our school, although it never felt like enough. Diego experienced some successes, and he struggled mightily. We tried to teach him life skills, as in going to the grocery store and counting change.

We knew he would certainly be substantially dependent on others for his entire life.

But we did identify a strength of his and tried to help him hone it and use it to contribute, worth noting because many schools are built in a way to basically ensure that students like Diego almost never have their strengths identified or understood.

Discovering Diego’s strength forced me to reflect on something people say: that anyone can do anything if they just set their mind to it. That idea, which seems liberating and empowering, might just be limiting and dumb. Can Diego really do anything? Can I?

Which is to say that Diego, about the most robotic and least congenial student you could want to find (on the outside anyway) taught us yet again that school is a place for human beings and therefore it should be a place with fewer constraints, more humanity, and more listening closely to what students are saying and figuring out what they are actually telling you.

Which is to further say that if we let the Diegos fade away while we’re online, or if we lose the will to serve them, we will have lost also a great deal else.

One more memory of Diego: each year a school day was devoted to Advisory Olympics and “Name That Tune” was one of the most popular and most intensely contested games. My advisory was gathered around a table, frantically working together to write the title and artist for each song as it played. Diego sat to one side, away from the group, as was his custom.

After ten seconds of a particularly obscure song, guess who broke the silence to say the title and artist, without looking anyone in the eye or displaying any outer signs of pride? The other students turned to Diego, incredulous, and he repeated the answer. “Come over and help us, Diego!” they cried. With a little less reluctance than I’d seen on many occasions, but still without the hint of a smile, he stood and joined them at the table.