I mean, my sister did have that level of cognitive disability, and she got her associates
degre. She got it with an enormous amount of help from family, because we didn't even know the school had to support her, though honestly community colleges can be much better about that shit than 4-year-colleges because they don't have as much of an attitude problem. Which actually gets back to Alison's point
I can’t speak to what specific accommodations might be available in those situations since I don’t know all the adaptive technology that might be possible
and Minoanmiss's
The discussion has a fortunate plurality of people pointing out that one should talk to the disabled applicant about what their plan is
because the person or their support network probably have a decent sense of what it would take to help them thrive and succeed.
I'm not saying that I haven't encountered people whose notion of "reasonable accommodation" was not "let me do want I want and don't hold me accountable" because of course I have. (I have never encountered it in anyone my age or older, because we didn't grow up getting any accommodations at all--which is obviously terrible--and I don't know a single disabled gen Xer who thinks we'll ever get anything we don't request formally in triplicate, with purple-tinted ditto paper.)
But it's amazing how creative people aren't, sometimes, when assessing what others' abilities are. I had to verbally slap down a colleague who jokingly said that of course our archivist job descriptions needed to include seeing and hearing -- which, no! You need neither of those to be an archivist, wtf! Most jobs that require "must lift 50 lbs" don't need it as long as others in the department can. And in schools, I've seen teachers act like providing audiobooks is pandering, an accommodation you make for kids who really need it but which is clearly inadequate to print-based literacy. As if the real difficult aspect of literacy is teaching letter-decoding, feh.
Coming up with what accommodations are reasonable can help employers and teachers really refine what the requirements genuinely are. What are your real teaching objectives? What makes a great employee?
no subject
I mean, my sister did have that level of cognitive disability, and she got her associates degre. She got it with an enormous amount of help from family, because we didn't even know the school had to support her, though honestly community colleges can be much better about that shit than 4-year-colleges because they don't have as much of an attitude problem. Which actually gets back to Alison's point
and Minoanmiss's
because the person or their support network probably have a decent sense of what it would take to help them thrive and succeed.
I'm not saying that I haven't encountered people whose notion of "reasonable accommodation" was not "let me do want I want and don't hold me accountable" because of course I have. (I have never encountered it in anyone my age or older, because we didn't grow up getting any accommodations at all--which is obviously terrible--and I don't know a single disabled gen Xer who thinks we'll ever get anything we don't request formally in triplicate, with purple-tinted ditto paper.)
But it's amazing how creative people aren't, sometimes, when assessing what others' abilities are. I had to verbally slap down a colleague who jokingly said that of course our archivist job descriptions needed to include seeing and hearing -- which, no! You need neither of those to be an archivist, wtf! Most jobs that require "must lift 50 lbs" don't need it as long as others in the department can. And in schools, I've seen teachers act like providing audiobooks is pandering, an accommodation you make for kids who really need it but which is clearly inadequate to print-based literacy. As if the real difficult aspect of literacy is teaching letter-decoding, feh.
Coming up with what accommodations are reasonable can help employers and teachers really refine what the requirements genuinely are. What are your real teaching objectives? What makes a great employee?