Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Friday, January 30, 2015
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Sunday, February 1, 2015
Saturday, January 31, 2015
ABLE Act Wonkery
Ann Carrns, New York Times - January 30, 2015
This is an unusually complete explanation of the new ABLE Act. Although it is written entirely from a money / personal finance perspective, it’s one of the few articles I have seen that gives anything close to equal weight to the idea of disabled individuals opening and using their own accounts for earnings.
Most stories about the ABLE Act focused almost exclusively on families setting aside money to “take care of” disabled loved ones. That’s certainly one of the intended uses of the law, but its one that assumes a more passive role for the disabled person. In fact, the ABLE Act should be very helpful to disabled people who have the opportunity to work and earn.
Of course, it is worth repeating and lamenting that all of this is only available to people disabled before age 26 … a somewhat last-minute restriction cuts out thousands of disabled people who could have benefitted.
Still, if this thing works out well, it could be expanded down the road.
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Friday, January 30, 2015
Max & Hank (and Adam & Kristina)
Liane Kupferberg Carter, The Mighty - January 10, 2015
In the almost two years since I started disability blogging, I have seen many excellent articles and blog posts, like the one above, offering advice to parents of disabled kids. Not surprisingly, there is a lot of overlap on these lists, since a lot of the best advice is really just common sense. Occasionally, I’ll see a suggestion I actually disagree with, but that’s fairly rare.
There is one bit of advice for “special needs parents” that I don’t think I have ever seen on a list like this:
Get to know an adult with your child’s disability.
I included this in a collaborative blog post I did last year with Kerith Stull, of the Brielle & Me blog, but other than that, I don’t think I have ever seen the idea or anything like it in any other advice article targeted to parents of disabled kids. Not that I think I’m so brilliant, but this surprises me. As I always try to say when I write about parenting, I am not a parent myself, but it seems to me like meeting an adult or two with a disability similar to your child’s would be a pretty obvious item for any parent’s to-do list. The relative absence of this idea on “special needs parenting” blogs suggests two possible explanations:
1. It’s just not occurring to parents, or
2. Parents do give this a try and for some reason don’t find it helpful or satisfying.
It’s the second possibility that has me most curious. I would be interested in hearing from parents of disabled kids who have come to know some adults with disabilities. Do you find that connection helpful, or not? If not, is there anything we, as disabled adults, could do differently to be more supportive of you and your child? You can post replies in the comments below.
Now that I think about it, I have seen this idea indirectly suggested on the TV show Parenthood. In one of the earlier seasons, Adam and Kristina Braverman, (whose son Max has Aperger Syndrome), meet a man living successfully with Asperger's. Later in the series, Max gets to know a photographer who discovers, through Max, that he may have Asperger's too. In both cases, Max's parents gain some perspective on Max's disability, and added hope for his future. It's well worth watching.
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Disability Blogging Link-Up
It's Friday. Time for another Disability Blogging Link-Up!
Use the thingamajig below to post a favorite blog post or article on something related to disability. You can post something you've written, or someone else's work you really like.
Here's how it works. In the "Your name" blank, type the name of the person or website, and the title of the article or post. For instance:
Disability Thinking: Best Disability Post Ever!
In the "Your URL" blank, paste the whole website address of the article you are posting.
Then click the "Enter" button. That's it!
Note: If your post doesn't appear immediately, try "refreshing" the page a few times. Sometimes it takes a little while to show up. Also, feel free to post more than one item. Finally, you might want to add a comment at the bottom of this post, to identify yourself or add an explanation or comment about the items you are posting.
Note: If your post doesn't appear immediately, try "refreshing" the page a few times. Sometimes it takes a little while to show up. Also, feel free to post more than one item. Finally, you might want to add a comment at the bottom of this post, to identify yourself or add an explanation or comment about the items you are posting.
Have fun posting and reading! This Link-Up will close at Midnight Eastern on Sunday.
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Dog Video Of The Day
Bonnie Burton, C-Net - January 28, 2015
I’m not feeling very chatty today, so I figured I’d share this story and embed one of the videos.
Notice that the reporter doesn’t call the dog “wheelchair bound”, usually a go-to journalistic term for human beings who use wheelchairs.
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Wednesday, January 28, 2015
Language, Privilege, And Stuff ...
Jonathan Chait says he's worried about “Political Correctness” and “Social Justice Warriors”.
On the bright side:
Alex Pareene at Gawker responds.
John Hodgman responds.
Andrea Shettle doesn’t directly respond, but her comments about ableist language do seem to relate in several ways.
In addition to liking the three responses above, here’s what I think:
The ultimate “privilege” is to be a “regular person”.
“Regular people” who are mean make jokes about other kinds of people, and use whatever words they want to describe them.
“Regular people” who are nice analyze and explain other kinds of people to other regular people … and to those other kinds of people, too.
“Regular people” become uncomfortable when the concept of “regular” seems to be dissolving, and when other groups express opinions of their own … especially when those opinions differ from those of “regular people”.
“Regular people” should probably just relax a bit. It’s very unlikely that they will truly lose much status in the end … apart from maybe the right to have all their jokes duly laughed at, and their ideas automatically taken seriously, always.
All this is quite applicable in the disability sphere. In one sense, disabled people are not “regular people” ... we are one of those “other kinds of people."
At the same time, there are a lot of disabled people who are, in every other respect, “regular people”. I’m pretty close to being “regular people” myself. One way you can tell is that I have a blog where I pontificate about my sensible, serious opinions every day.
All this is quite applicable in the disability sphere. In one sense, disabled people are not “regular people” ... we are one of those “other kinds of people."
At the same time, there are a lot of disabled people who are, in every other respect, “regular people”. I’m pretty close to being “regular people” myself. One way you can tell is that I have a blog where I pontificate about my sensible, serious opinions every day.
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Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Disability.TV Ep. 19 - American Horror Story: Freak Show
"Don’t you get it? This place is as good as it gets for folks like us … but we take care of each other.”
“The way they look at us. The way they treat us. It ain’t right!”
“That’s showbiz."
American Horror Story: Freak Show … Is it a degrading abomination or an exhilarating walk on the wilder side of disability? I’ll explore this and other related questions with disabled activist, artist, and podcaster Jane Hash.
Use the links below to subscribe, comment, and read more about topics mentioned in this episode.
Plain Jane: The SHOCKUMENTARY
YouTube profile of AHS: Freak Show actor Matt Frasier
YouTube profile of AHS: Freak Show actor Jyoti Amge
YouTube profile of AHS: Freak Show actor Matt Frasier
YouTube profile of AHS: Freak Show actor Jyoti Amge
Hear More and Subscribe:
If you are so inclined, please leave an iTunes or Stitcher review. Positive reviews help more people discover the Disability.TV Podcast.
Comment:
Monday, January 26, 2015
More Thoughts On Education
Following up on Saturday’s post on Education:
As I think back over all of the interactions I have had with disabled students and their families, I realize that most of the complaints and traumas the students, themselves talked about were about how they were treated by people … teachers, counselors, and fellow students … and relatively little about the curriculum itself being too hard. I mean, I’m sure that most of them also experienced a lot of frustration over the content, too, but most of even those complaints were about botched or denied accommodations, not about the material being “above” their cognitive ability.
Quite a few parents, and a lot of teachers, worried about whether it was cruel to hold more disabled students to “higher standards”. There was this very prevalent idea that it was somehow self-evident that some unspecified percentage of Special Education students were simply incapable of getting a regular diploma … and the percentage was aways inching upward.
I almost never heard students, themselves, complain about higher standards. One might argue that perhaps they didn’t have the vocabulary or conceptual understanding to make complaints that specific, but in my experience they had little trouble being specific about their other complaints.
Also, I can’t think of a single disabled student who ended up worse off or more unhappy because they took more tests or were more fully integrated in more demanding classes. But I can think of scores of kids and young adults I met who were definitely worse off than they needed to be, in part because teachers, counselors, and families thought school should be “easier” for them.
This is all anecdotal of course, based only on my personal memories which may also be faulty. Still the pattern is striking.
So although I’m still ambivalent about stuff like “high stakes” testing, and I don't necessarily trust schools to make good decisions about accommodations, I generally feel an instinct to stick up for more rigor, not less, in education of kids with disabilities.
Sunday, January 25, 2015
Weekly Wrap-Up
Monday, January 19, 2015
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
Wednesday, January 21, 2015
Thursday, January 22, 2015
Friday, January 23, 2015
Saturday, January 24, 2015
Saturday, January 24, 2015
Caught Between Sides
Michelle Diament, Disability Scoop - January 23, 2015
I am only superficially familiar with the basic outlines of current debates over Education. It seems like one side wants to make K-12 education a bit more rigorous, supposedly because some sort of slack has crept into the system. Another side worries that the “higher standards” people are mostly interested in lots and lots of standardized testing and in de-clawing teacher’s unions, not so much about actually educating kids better.
Kids are caught in the middle, and if anything it’s worse and more confusing for kids with disabilities. It seems like the “special education” debate is shifting a bit, in time with the larger conflict.
Special Education debates used to be all about self-contained, segregated placement vs. “mainstreaming”. Sadly, these are still active issues, fought underneath the surface with all sorts of euphemisms. Now, though things have shifted a bit so that there are two other camps, too. One says that by and large, disabled kids are much smarter and more capable than schools and even parents realize. More disabled kids should be taking tests, passing regular classes, and getting real diplomas.
The other says that disabled kids, of all kids, should be spared the humiliation of being pushed through the test-taking wringer like everyone else. It’s easy for ivory-tower reformers to simply assert that 90% of disabled kids can get regular diplomas … can that really really true? Or is it just something they say to keep everyone on their toes, or because it fits with their preconception that “today’s education” stinks?
Whatever you think about tests specifically, isn’t it possible that most disabled kids can achieve more than is typically asked of them in school? Shouldn’t we err on the side of competence? How many generations of kids have we let slip though without gaining skills they might really have gained, if we’d pushed them a bit harder and been a bit more creative? At the same time, will "higher standards" just mean shoving disabled kids willy-nilly through the same system, without disability-specific supports or accommodations?
I honestly don’t know the answers to these questions.
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Friday, January 23, 2015
Refutations
It’s good to see a variety of outlets coming out to defend Social Security Disability and refute Rand Paul’s nonsense:
Stodgy old newspapers ... LA Times: "Bias against the disabled is as American as apple pie"
Hip online magazines … Vox.com: "Rand Paul says "over half" of people on disability have anxiety or a bad back. Nope."
Disability Blogging Link-Up
A link-up is a special type of blog post that allows visitors to post links to any blog post they like, from any blog or website. To see a working example, visit this link-up at Love That Max.
Like Ellen at Love That Max, I plan on making this a weekly “weekend” link-up. I’ll post a new one every Friday, and leave it open for posts until late Sunday. As per the title, “Disability Blogging Link-Up”, I invite everyone to post their favorite recent blog posts about disability, broadly defined. There is no practical limit on how many items you can post, but I’ll ask everyone to limit themselves to 3 posts per weekend. Also, posting your own work is definitely encouraged!
I hope these link-ups will become another reliable place to see all the best stuff on disability each week.
Where it says "Your name" type the name of the blog followed by the title of the post you want to share (or just the name of the post, if there's no room—you get 80 characters).
Where it says "Your URL" put the direct link to the post. Click “Enter”, and that’s it.
You might also want to add a Comment below, (using the regular comment link) if you have any explanatory notes about the items you post.
Of course, the best part is checking out the links to what other disability bloggers have posted. The more people contribute, the more there will be for us to read each weekend.
Of course, the best part is checking out the links to what other disability bloggers have posted. The more people contribute, the more there will be for us to read each weekend.
Thursday, January 22, 2015
“Cripface"
Scott Jordan Harris, Slate.com - January 20, 2014
I look for three things in TV and film depictions of disability:
1. Authenticity about the details of the disability.
2. Fully developed disabled characters.
3. Insight into real-life disability issues.
Number 3 is optional. Authenticity and fully developed disabled characters are quite often enough for a satisfying disability depiction. Tackling disability issues is a nice extra, when done naturally and not in a “You see Timmy …” moment.
To me, the issue of “Cripface” ... non-disabled actors playing disabled characters ... isn’t whether it is inherently wrong or offensive, so much as whether or not it meets these criteria, resulting in good depictions of disability.
It’s probably important to note here that “good” and "satisfying" often means different things to disabled and non-disabled viewers. The typical moviegoer or TV-watcher seems to have different criteria for disability stories and disabled characters:
1. They want to feel happy when the thing is over.
2. They like feeling lots of feels … sadness, pity, admiration, inspiration.
3. They want to think they have learned about certain disabled people, but they aren’t so interested in learning about disability itself or disability-based injustice.
4. They love “stunt” acting, where an actor convincingly portrays a character that is completely unlike themselves.
I think number 4 is where the Oscar-bait thing comes in. When a non-disabled actor seems to do a good job of playing disabled, most viewers latch onto it as a clear example of raw acting ability. Since a lot of acting talent is subtle and hard for non-critics to identify, there may even be some excitement about being able to easily pinpoint when an actor has done something really difficult … like an able-bodied actor playing a well-known disabled person. Eddie Redmayne looks a lot like Stephen Hawking, so right away, there's an assumed element of "Wow!"
One reason I like this Slate review is that it does give some specific evidence that maybe Eddie Redmayne and the writers didn’t, in fact, do such a great job of portraying Stephen Hawking. I haven't seen 'The Theory Of Everything", so I can't judge for myself. What Mr. Harris describes, however, is not encouraging.
As I indicated, I think it can be done well. I still greatly admire “My Left Foot”, in which the non-disabled actor Daniel Day-Lewis played Christy Brown, an Irish poet who had Cerebral Palsy. I think one reason I still like that film is that the writers made sure to give us a pretty full picture of the man, and avoided most of the usual disability cliches, like dreaming of being “normal” and being super-sweet, that make so many disability depictions seem fake and predictable. It also introduced and fully explored some truths about disability that aren't as familiar to mainstream audiences ... such as the complex nature of disability sexuality, and the problematic ways that "do gooders" often relate to disabled people. Finally, I got stuff out of "My Left Foot", as a disabled person, that I'll bet most viewers missed. It sounds to me like there's nothing challenging or original in "The Theory Of Everything" ... nothing that will rock any disabled viewer's world.
It does seem like “My Left Foot” is the exception that proves the rule. “Cripface” is bad because it’s inherently offensive, but what’s even worse is that most of the time it produces bad art. Put another way, non-disabled actors are apt to make mistakes, and allow mistakes to be made, that disabled actors just wouldn't.
I look for three things in TV and film depictions of disability:
1. Authenticity about the details of the disability.
2. Fully developed disabled characters.
3. Insight into real-life disability issues.
Number 3 is optional. Authenticity and fully developed disabled characters are quite often enough for a satisfying disability depiction. Tackling disability issues is a nice extra, when done naturally and not in a “You see Timmy …” moment.
To me, the issue of “Cripface” ... non-disabled actors playing disabled characters ... isn’t whether it is inherently wrong or offensive, so much as whether or not it meets these criteria, resulting in good depictions of disability.
It’s probably important to note here that “good” and "satisfying" often means different things to disabled and non-disabled viewers. The typical moviegoer or TV-watcher seems to have different criteria for disability stories and disabled characters:
1. They want to feel happy when the thing is over.
2. They like feeling lots of feels … sadness, pity, admiration, inspiration.
3. They want to think they have learned about certain disabled people, but they aren’t so interested in learning about disability itself or disability-based injustice.
4. They love “stunt” acting, where an actor convincingly portrays a character that is completely unlike themselves.
I think number 4 is where the Oscar-bait thing comes in. When a non-disabled actor seems to do a good job of playing disabled, most viewers latch onto it as a clear example of raw acting ability. Since a lot of acting talent is subtle and hard for non-critics to identify, there may even be some excitement about being able to easily pinpoint when an actor has done something really difficult … like an able-bodied actor playing a well-known disabled person. Eddie Redmayne looks a lot like Stephen Hawking, so right away, there's an assumed element of "Wow!"
One reason I like this Slate review is that it does give some specific evidence that maybe Eddie Redmayne and the writers didn’t, in fact, do such a great job of portraying Stephen Hawking. I haven't seen 'The Theory Of Everything", so I can't judge for myself. What Mr. Harris describes, however, is not encouraging.
As I indicated, I think it can be done well. I still greatly admire “My Left Foot”, in which the non-disabled actor Daniel Day-Lewis played Christy Brown, an Irish poet who had Cerebral Palsy. I think one reason I still like that film is that the writers made sure to give us a pretty full picture of the man, and avoided most of the usual disability cliches, like dreaming of being “normal” and being super-sweet, that make so many disability depictions seem fake and predictable. It also introduced and fully explored some truths about disability that aren't as familiar to mainstream audiences ... such as the complex nature of disability sexuality, and the problematic ways that "do gooders" often relate to disabled people. Finally, I got stuff out of "My Left Foot", as a disabled person, that I'll bet most viewers missed. It sounds to me like there's nothing challenging or original in "The Theory Of Everything" ... nothing that will rock any disabled viewer's world.
It does seem like “My Left Foot” is the exception that proves the rule. “Cripface” is bad because it’s inherently offensive, but what’s even worse is that most of the time it produces bad art. Put another way, non-disabled actors are apt to make mistakes, and allow mistakes to be made, that disabled actors just wouldn't.
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