Ableism

I read through Hehir's ableism article a few weeks back and found that the type of education that the handicapped students that were mentioned in the article seemed to mirror closely what I have read (and to a much lesser extent, seen) in regards to the teaching of English language learners (ELLs).

Instead of creating deeper connections with the content areas that are being taught, the students are being instructed in a way that overly focuses on their disability. While having English as a second language is not an actual disability, the type of instruction that the students receive tends to completely focus on that instead of trying to make the content accessible. While it is important that students develop the skills to read and write in English autonomously, I feel as though we are doing a disservice to students when we place them in science classes that uses instruction focused nearly entirely on reading comprehension. We are not helping the students gain a deeper understanding of the material, we are teaching them the skill of the English language and letting them fall behind compared to their English speaking peers.

It is equally distressing to read about this sort of thing happening to disabled students who would otherwise be able to grasp the grade level content if only the correct accommodations were made to allow it.

APIASF

A few weeks ago, I took advantage of doing the scholarship readings for the APIASF (Asian and Pacific Islander American Scholarship Fund). I found the experience to be very interesting as a whole. Most of the student applications that I read stunned me with the amount of extracurricular activities these students were performing while obtaining high grade point averages. Some students were doing really high level activities, such as working on robotics, in the health care field, or making web pages for large companies or the government. I couldn't even imagine doing things like that while I was in high school.

There were a few times that I felt as though the students could have used some help to tweak their answers though. The method of scoring the questions involved a lot of reading into what hardships they have faced and how they planned to bring their goals back to helping the community. Unfortunately the essay questions themselves were split into 3 questions: "What are your goals?" "How will you serve the community?" and "What hardships have you faced?" I feel as though it would be better if they had the students write a single long essay that asks them to hit on all three of those instead of three small essays, that is still being scored on how well they hit on all three of those, but only asks for one at a time.

I also found that a lot of students didn't really pick a great person to write a letter of recommendation. For the most part, the letters I read consisted of "X is a great student, they always do their work on time and get good grades." While that is useful information, it didn't really show any connection to the student, and made it impossible for the letter to link in with what it was being scored on, such as showing why the student/community would benefit from the scholarship going to that student.

As a side oddity, the vast, vast majority of the applications I ended up reading were from females.