BA of general studies?

TwistedxKiss
Tue, 23 Mar 2010 15:20:26 +0000

I really didn’t want this thread to become another LD argument, but apparently I do need to explain myself. I apologize for the length, unfortunately this is a complicated story and it seems no one will take me at my word without a detailed retelling of the whole story.



“Twisted, you have written of the varying and changing details of your situation(s) with Learning Disabilities and your Spanish requirement for a very long while now. I think that if a portion of the attitude you have shown some of the folks who have tried to respond to this latest incarnation of your sitution is in any way indicative as to how you conduct yourself at your University, then your University is doing the right thing in just plainly informing you that you can totally earn a BA in General Studies and just ethically call things a day on any further study of Spanish”



I don’t understand comments about my attitude. I took loads of Spanish at another school with a more doable curriculum for me without a single complaint. I didn’t enjoy it at all, but I did it, like anyone else. I COULD do it there. It wasn’t any problem there, it was harder for me than others but I love a challenge, I did it without a word. I came to Michigan in the Fall and my advisers were very worried about it and advised me to petition the standards board, which took the entire semester to orchestrate and I did it in the Winter. The Board told me they thought I could do it, and though I thought their reasoning was strange I said okay and signed up for the class, and have been doing my best. I have hit a variety of circumstances where, for one disability or another, even though I have the knowledge I am supposed to I am not able to execute it in the way I need to for an assignment. I am thankfully pretty good at Spanish so sometimes I can work my way around these things, sometimes I cant. I did the best I could and mainly just failed all those assignments, but still did not complain.

Recently the situation worsened as more and more of those assignments kept coming up, and finally it was a huge exam where essentially 35% of the grade was based on not being autistic, and failings were assumed to be due to lack of Spanish knowledge rather than communication skills, which isn’t an accurate representation of my Spanish knowledge at all. I asked my adviser at the disabilities office if I should talk to my professor or what I should do, and he recommended I re-petition and look into a BGS. So I did. This whole time I have been playing along and doing exactly as I have been advised to do, and have only complained when THAT was what I was told to do. It’s not like I am off scheming all day trying to figure out how to get out of things I don’t like. This is my sixth semester of Spanish and I fully intended to take 8 if that was what it took to complete the requirement, I took algebra twice AND statistics, and I didn’t even need any of those math courses. I am unfortunately pretty heavily disabled in math, and disabled enough to make Spanish an awful burden that is only at times surmountable. I have not run away from that, in fact I have embraced it. I am doing the best I can, really. But there comes a point when your best isn’t good enough, and the disabilities office tells you to take other measures. So that is what I am doing. I just want to cooperate with whatever I can so I can graduate. I would have thought the fact that I was willing to GIVE UP MY MAJOR just to graduate would have indicated that. What kind of idiot do you take me for? You really think it is MOST LOGICAL to assume that I am just so lazy and unwilling to meet requirements that I am willing to give up the one thing I came to college to study just so I don’t have to do it? Seriously? Even if I weren’t an aspie I can’t imagine giving up studying my one true love just to get out of Spanish. That is completely absurd.

And I HAVE been talking about this a long time. Unfortunately in this world, disabilities aren’t a cookie cutter thing where if you have X disorder, you have the following list of symptoms and no others and nothing relates to anything else, or anything like that, especially when you have a combination of disabilities-- which is precisely my problem. You have all these puzzle pieces and you know what problems they are causing, but unfortunately you do not always know right away how they go together to make a disorder. Sometimes some of the pieces connect to make ADD, and some make dyscalculia, and some make autism, and they are all overlapping and interworking. It’s much more complicated than the DSM makes it out to be, especially when there are multiple disorders present. From September to February we didn’t have all the pieces to my puzzle, for portions of this battle we have known I was struggling disproportionately but didn’t know why and therefore could do nothing about it, and now we do have those pieces. We have a name for all the communication problems we didn’t before, and while in the real world the name doesn’t change anything, in the Board meeting that name means everything. The circumstances haven’t CHANGED, we just learned more along the way. I only just found out in February that I have autism. That is kind of a big deal, and yes, it does give us a more complete picture of my abilities and disabilities which may change the perspective somewhat. We know a lot more about me, and what I struggle with and why, than we did when I first petitioned. It is a complicated mess, I completely hate it, and I want nothing more to just be normal so I can take the classes and struggle like anyone else and be done with it. I don’t want anyones sympathy. I just want to be able to finish the requirement. It’s messy and complicated and I assure you I am more frustrated than any of you. It seems I have to be mentally handicapped in order for people to believe that there are some things I literally CANT do. There is more to what makes your mind and your body function than intelligence. There are some basic functions the “abled” crowd takes for granted that I was simply born without.



“As for the Spanish, unless I am mistaken Twisted is now completing what Michigan will count as her second semester of Spanish, not third. She says she got credit for three semesters at a community college, but obviously not at a level that Michigan accepted, or that let her pass a placement test even for avoiding first semester Spanish. My understanding is that she has taken two years of Spanish in CC with accommodations, for which she is receiving no credit, and one year at Michigan, with a lot of trouble.”



This is mostly correct. At community college, I took Spanish 101, failed 102, took an out of sequence class to build my skills, retook 102, and took 201. You cannot complete the foreign language requirement out of residence, so though Michigan considers these courses equivalent and I DID receive credit for them, I have to retake the courses anyway because of my placement test results and surrender all those credits since I can’t be given credit for a course twice. I had one opportunity to start at Michigan where I was at Schoolcraft, as I explained, in the placement test at orientation, but the Schoolcraft program was VERY different from Michigan’s and posed little to no problems related to disabilities for me, so I didn’t anticipate needing accommodations since I’d never needed them before, and I DON’T whine and try to get things I don’t really need.

Because I misjudged that situation and really needed accommodations, I ended up testing into second semester Michigan Spanish, which is where I am at now and the equivalent of the 102 class I already took twice. I have not yet passed any Spanish at Michigan. I have a C- in it at present because my grades started average and have been getting lower and lower, so if I pass will depend on how the final exam goes in a few weeks.

It’s incredibly frustrating because I have attained the knowledge. I can read and write exceptionally well, and my listening is good when there aren’t 15 people trying to talk at once since I can’t tune out extraneous noise, but that is only about a quarter of the course. So I don’t know how it will go. Some of my deficits are passable in this course because it is not expected that I be that good, it’s just assumed I don’t have the knowledge yet since I’m a beginner. But I am not a beginner and I do have the knowledge, and when the class advances into intermediate levels those deficits keeping me from displaying more than a beginners level of knowledge are still going to be there. No matter how much I learn, it won’t get any better if I lack the functions to display that knowledge in the specific way required in the course. The PhD at the disabilities office saw what was happening and told me to petition again. I’m just doing as I was advised.