The Last Frontier

Dear Ira Glass,

By this time you’ve probably figured out that writing letters to you is not my day job. I’m a teacher. Really? What grade? A special education teacher. Oh. You must be really patient. An early childhood special education teacher. Huh? Specifically, I teach infants and toddlers, and their families. What do you teach toddlers? Like, how to walk?

Maybe, in these days when autism is in the mainstream media every other day, you’ve heard of early intervention. Teaching very young children (like, infancy to age five) with special needs the skills that will help them succeed at home, school, and in community environments. Help close the gap between them and their typically developing peers.

It sounds so great, doesn’t it? And it is so great. It’s so great that, if the economy didn’t happen to tank at this exact time, public and private agencies around the nation and probably most of the Western world would be pouring copious amounts of funding into implementing early intervention. Because it makes sense on so many societal levels. Research and popular thought agree that it makes sense from an educational perspective (kids catch up early, and need less help later), an economic perspective (close the achievement gap and more kids can become contributing workforce members), and a familial perspective (kids can learn from an early age how to better access and maintain a variety of relationships). Also, did I mention that it makes sense from an economic perspective? If children with disabilities catch up to their peers when they are young, society doesn’t have to spend extra time and money educating them during school and providing support for them throughout adulthood.

So it makes sense, and it sounds great. And it works. All around the country there are stories of children who have experienced early intervention and gradually gone on to succeed in school and society without extra support, alongside their peers.

And now it’s time for that word. The inevitable word.

Normal.

Normal. In a normal way. Within normal limits. Typically developing. Meaning you can make it in the world independently, or with moderate supports and resources you know how to get for yourself. You can figure it out, with the way things work now, the way things are.

So what about the other stories? The stories where children experience early intervention and they learn, but they don’t totally catch up? The stories where children grow into men and women who need support well into adulthood? The stories of the parents who are trying to figure out who will take care of their son or daughter after they’re gone?

Other.

Does early intervention still make sense in these stories?

That isn’t rhetorical. I’m asking you, for real, does it make sense? To you? To people you know? This open-ended question, this does it, and if so why, and if not why, and above all how? Because I’ll be the first to tell you: as someone on the inside, as an early childhood special education teacher, I know my answer to the first two. But the third- the how- that’s a lifelong question. I’ll be figuring that one out for the rest of my days.

Keith Jones, disability rights activist, arrested my attention regarding this issue when I first saw him featured in the film Including Samuel. He argues that the campaign for a fair shot in society for people with disabilities is the last frontier, the “last great struggle” of the civil rights movement. Keith Jones makes sense to me. Keith Jones and I are ultimately working toward the same goals for people- with and without disabilities, children and adults. We have completely different experiences, different backgrounds, different careers, yet to both of us actualizing equal rights and opportunities for people with disabilities in society is long, long overdue.

So, yes, sometimes I am teaching toddlers to walk. I’m working to make sure they learn the skills that will allow them to access the general education curriculum as they get older. If they are behind their peers in development, I’m constantly reinventing my teaching style to help them catch up. But it goes so, so far beyond that. With all of my students, special needs or not, I’m teaching acceptance. Respect. Open-mindedness, open-heartedness. Perseverance in a community through the rough times. The days that are a total mess because we don’t get each other. We are so different, and we are so great. There is total great chaos in my classroom. One child is grinning brilliantly because he’s so nervous to be in a room full of thirteen other two-year-olds, one is leaping over the block area as he rushes to assert ownership of a child-size grocery cart, another is weeping into her mother’s arm as the latter prepares to leave against all maternal instinct, another is tugging my sleeve and earnestly telling me  ”Iwa boo gulla no-no” over and over again as if I will somehow understand the twenty-fourth time. All are wholly and gloriously themselves, feeling everything immediately, seeking their own shapes, their own names in this shared space. And so I have to ask the question that so many teachers and parents have asked before me: as I prepare my students to someday enter society and succeed to the best of their ability, is society getting ready for them? Are people ready now? Will the world be ready in approximately sixteen-to-nineteen years when my students graduate high school? Special education teacher or not, I can’t wait. I am not patient for this. Not all my students have a place in society as it is now. The standards to make it, to succeed independently enough, are pretty narrow right now. Being other among people in the mainstream is a pretty tight squeeze right now. It’s hard to breathe there. Not a lot of people like to hang out there. It isn’t very glamorous.

So let me ask you this: what would you be without that space? How would you be if there were no chaos? Even if you don’t spend everyday in the mess, can’t you sense it on the outsides of your consciousness, blurring your shape into an aurora, into something collaborative, into the other? Imagine your life without it. What a serious loss.

When I was a little girl I was obsessed with pioneers. I thought I was born in the wrong century. I dreamed of climbing into a covered wagon and heading for lands unknown with my family, with a community of other people in other wagons, tumultuous gathering. Cobbled together with rocks and wood and rope, searching every dawn and setting sun for a new strain, a new streak of color in the path of the wandering wagon train. Closing the gap between what is and what could be. Not necessarily between defeat and success, slow progress and visible achievement, the steps forward and back. More between narrow, squinting, tethered expectations and heart-hunting, root-tangling release. Crossing the frontier. It flashes before you every time the wheels jump underneath the reins.

Come on. Climb on the wagon train. You know you want to.

Sincerely,

Courtney