Working And Learning with Professors as a Student with a Disability

I've been a part time student at UCCS for a long time and I've seen quite a bit. I have seen academic programs get created and discontinued. I've seen professors come and go. I've seen the bus routes change. And its too much to boil down, really. But I can try. My best and worst experiences with faculty have all come down to whether or not they were willing to be brave, be brutally honest, to see me as an individual and to think outside the box when necessary. Those who weren't...well, they overcompensated. This includes professors *Who put me in the same category as another student with a similar disability in my class even tho' the two of us had completely different diagnoses and situations. *Treated the absence policy like it was the ten commandments. *Expected me to comment exclusively on the disabled perspective. *Thought because they had sustained a temporary injury that they knew everything about people with disabilities or worse, me in particular. *Tried way too hard like getting down on their knees or asking to get down on their knees to talk to me. Granted, that is a respectful gesture but its very intimate in my book. *Refused to come up with an alternate assignment or alternate deadlines even when my disability clearly made certain assignments and deadlines an issue. And worst of all, *Told me they would be alright with me taking their class and then did any or all of the stuff I just mentioned! I dropped all those classes, by the way. But I've had professors that I loved too! You know the kind that you write 20-page papers for of your own free will because you want to impress them? Those professors were the ones who threw the absence policy to the wind when I caught severe pneumonia, essentially letting me take the course via correspondence, and I came out of there with a B+. *I turned into a five-year-old in the middle of this theater class and wet my pants on stage. Legit! (laughs) So my professor, in the interest of everybody's noses let me turn in written assignments instead of performances after that. *Bought me ice-cream after watching me fight through test anxiety. Now ice-cream is not required, but if somebody is really freaking out, flattery will get you everywhere! (laughing) *So, I take the bus to school everyday. Its this long, miserable, 45-minute ride that usually ends with me taking a nap. But this one professor figured out that we had the same bus ride and turned my afternoon nap into unofficial office hours. *Gave me a hug when I was having a really bad day. *Discussed disability issues with me openly but in private because he was looking at my disability as a problem that we could both brainstorm and get around, not me as a defective student. I made it out of all of those classes with B's or A's and I wrote 15 -20 page papers of my own free will for assignments that were supposed to be short. When professors are nice to me I want to impress them. What can I say! (laughs) Leyna: Cynthia wrote the following story about an art class she took in childhood...The teacher was introducing us to still-life drawing by having us sketch her baseball cap for class. Eager and slightly conniving students that we were, we all drew baseball caps and turned them in as fast as could. "I should fail you all!" she told us when she looked at them "but I'm going to give you another chance to complete your assignment tomorrow." "Why?" we protested, "We drew you a baseball cap just like you wanted." "No," she corrected us "I told you to draw MY baseball cap, THIS one." She pointed to her cap on the table. "You all gave me generic drawings of what you think a baseball cap, any baseball cap should look like. None of you drew MY cap." And so, we were introduced to the concept of paradigms. As hard and messy as it often is, and I realize that nobody likes hard, and even fewer people like a mess, a good professor looks at and works with students...meaning the actual, physical, whole, flesh and blood students that are sitting with them or typing to them online that day. A good professor improvises, actively keeping their Normal College Student paradigm in check. Yes, it creates a mess. But it also creates a pure, and more multi-faceted kind of academic excellence that benefits the whole student, not just the GPA. And by extension the whole campus, and not just the person getting the diploma. It is worth it.