Citation

"Is that true? You served in Kuwait and Iraq?"
"Unfortunately," he replied. I had spent the majority of the past hour looking at his army leather jacket while he toiled over scarps of notes. He gave his life to the country and now here he is in community college writing a paper on koi ponds. I was assigned to work with him because he uses disability software, but he had no trouble with the software. He mainly needed help double spacing and saving to his flash-drive. Finding the parentheses was difficult. I asked him why he indented every line. He did not know what a paragraph was. We had fifteen minutes left and he needed help citing his sources. He had a pile of articles carefully printed and underlined but forgot a lot of the titles he had used. We're supposed to encourage the student to take the lead in all their learning, but he was getting nervous. I had another appointment soon, and besides that, the library was about to close. I sat with the APA stylebook on my lap and told him what info belonged where. I did not make him look it up. Even with me guiding the ship, he would forget punctuation or leave things blank. He dropped a paper and told me he has mental trauma. And I swear the whole scene went black and white. It's no surprise that academia can seem ridiculous sometimes, but oh my god this human does not need to learn in-text citations. He taps a million spaces to correctly right-align the professor's name. I ask if he knows how to do that any other ways. He says, "Ma'am, I don't know nothin'."

Goodbye Disabilities Center

It's been almost three years since I worked at the Disabilities Center. Proctoring tests to disabled students was my part-time job in grad school. I am immensely grateful for the experience. I worked daytime only, on campus, and sometimes I was set in duties where I could read or write. The position helped me become a better teacher and certainly a much better person.

I was let go at the start of my final semester of school. I was devastated. My boss fought to keep me, but I was already a halftime instructor for ASU, and with Obamacare looming, the school was was paranoid about providing benefits. In a truly demeaning manner, the HR person for my graduate program wrote me saying I was being forced out of other work because I needed to focus on my studies. (After providing proof I had maintained an A average during my entire tenure at school she admitted, "Okay, it's about not giving you health care.")

I remember one of my last days at work. I was scribing for a student in a wheelchair who didn't have the use of his hands. I wrote out the short answers for him on his history exam. He coughed and asked if I could reach in his bag, get the water bottle, insert a straw, and give him a drink. "Sure," I said. I was holding the water to his mouth and thinking about the exam topics. I was remembering some stuff about Britain's empire I had forgotten since high school. (Another thing I loved about the job--insight to so many subjects!) He said, "Okay," and I put the bottle away. I had a conscious thought, "That would have felt weird two years ago." Even interviewing with my boss, a woman who was very slow to speak with, what seemed like, little control of her head, had set me on edge. I want to believe I was simply concerned in an interview scenario that I wouldn't nail it because I was having some trouble understanding her, but truthfully I had never spent an extended time with anyone much physically different than me. On that Arizona cool December day, while jotting down answers about British opium trade, the bitterness of being forced from my job melted. I felt a swell of thankfulness for the empathy education I had slowly accumulated without even knowing it.

Private Room Syndrome

One of my students hums when she writes. I don't think it is conscious, and it is just quiet enough that it would feel strange to make a fuss about it...but not so quiet that it's not annoying. I am contemplating how to approach the issue because this student is autistic and has confided in me that certain things can really fluster her. What if she can't stop?

I am reminded of a very bubbly student I often worked with at my old post in the disability center. She was talkative and happy, but when she was alone with a test suddenly she would let out the most aggressive strings of curses, tell herself she was stupid, scream, pound on tables. We put her in a one-person study room for exams. The one-person study rooms were highly coveted. No door opening like in the ADD room. No scratching of others' pens. Lots of space to stretch. Students who had mild anxiety would often try to weasel their way into those rooms. "They are reserved," we would explain. We didn't allow anyone in even if they weren't going to be used all day so no one would get used to the treatment.

But I would show this girl to her room and she would say, "Oh, no thank you. I would like to be in the bigger room." I would explain she was placed in the private room. "No, I don't want it." We would explain she was a distraction to others and she just couldn't believe it. She fought us basically every time.