Noisy Skin Bag
2 min readSep 23, 2024

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I have experience from both sides, as a disabled student, and a disabled teacher teaching students, some of whom (most likely, we were never given any info) were disabled. I really think, that in addition to better training for instructors and school staff, we must embrace technology in order to truly customize education on an individual level and get schools away from this assembly line way of doing things where big groups of kids are assigned to classrooms based on little else besides age, geography, and in more indirect ways, class and race. For the most part, I see instructors fearing and suppressing that which could be harnessed to actually make differentiation easier, preferring to keep low-tech old-school methods around.

I don't think segregation is a good idea. Instead, we need to move toward universal design and use assessment tools for diagnosing disabilities as a way to get better data as opposed to the key that opens the gate to basic accessibility. Too many kids (such as myself) slip through the cracks undiagnosed and too many are put in self-contained rooms only to be taught at a slower pace regardless of if they actually need it and infantilized. At the university level, professors need to actually get taught how to teach at all in the first place.

I found it fascinating to learn that things in Turkey seem to be the opposite from the US (where I have done all of my schooling and teaching) concerning the role of private schools. In the US, public K-12 schools are (in almost every case where someone is in-district) required to admit disabled kids (what happens after that is another story) and private schools can accept and kick out essentially whoever they want and are far less regulated.

Private schools in the US are often a status symbol and means of religious control for the parents and acceptance at some can be as competitive as university admissions. Disabled kids readily get kicked out of most private schools because the school wants to protect its image of being "elite".

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Noisy Skin Bag
Noisy Skin Bag

Written by Noisy Skin Bag

I am formally diagnosed with autism, ADHD, and OCD, and have informal diagnoses of PDA and 2e. I share my experience navigating the disability landscape.

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