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COMING INTO THE CLASSROOM
Georgina: Part of what our bodies teach in the classroom has to do with role modeling. Both students with disabilities and students without disabilities see a person with a disability in a position of authority, and, without having to say anything about it, it's a way of demonstrating that one can have authority and an intellectual life and a career and all these things. Over time the novelty of our otherness can disappear. In my case students know I can't see them, can't see their faces; I can't see them when they raise their hands so they have to speak up. After a while they sort of forget why that practice is imposed in my classroom, it just becomes a part of who I am as a teacher.
Brenda: I always have wondrously mixed feelings about that kind of different, but then naturalized, interaction over disability. Mostly, I love itbecause it keeps a kind of productive tension ongoing and that tension makes evident then how classrooms are extremely normalized. Public education in America has been all about that normalizing-from standardized testing to the whole notion of public schools, it's really about upholding a kind of normalized view that we all function and learn in the same way. And so in some ways Fm not surprised that happens, Georgina-that they begin to normalize you. In some ways I'm enchanted when students get to the point where they say that they have forgotten entirely about my difference, my "disability." And soon they don't even notice anymore the Frequency Modulated system I sometimes use-or how I make them repeat things that another one said or make them do all the writing on the board.1 And yet, in the beginning of a class, the FM system is a new marker that really shakes them up, just having this little piece of hi-tech equipment on the table and they all stare at that the first day and then pretty soon they forget entirely. (Until the day someone says something a bit zany and then I pick it up, hold it to my mouth, and say "Beam me up, Scottie.")
And that makes me feel good that I can pass . . . but then it also...