While reading Nielsen's telling of the country's history through the lens of disability, I was interested in how attitudes about disability related to the broader political/social/economic climate. I was surprised by the author's account of Coleridge's mental illness, particularly the lack of stigma surrounding this type of difference. It was intersting that the community used him for his teaching abilities at the same time as acknowledging that he had significant care needs. Nielson's account of this time seems to show a very economically 'pragmatic' view of disability that focused on the economic potential of each individual.

In class, we talked a little about the controversy surrounding The Doll Test and its impact on the Brown vs. Board decision. Here is a quick article laying out the different points. 

http://www.theroot.com/the-doll-test-for-racial-self-hate-did-it-ever-make-se-1790875716

A Disability History of the United States by Kim Nielsen gave a complete summary of the history of disability in North America. Nielsen brought in the perspective on disabiity  from several groups of people who have profoundly shaped the history of North America. The beginning of the book focused on Native Americans understanding of disability, which I found extremely fascinating considering how difficult it is to write about America pre-Columbian era due to the lack of primary sources. As the book continued, Nielsen exposes how European colonization brought a very different perspective on disability to America.

Not the most pressing issue, but one of the key issues in Urban Education that I have noticed so far is leadership in schools, on both a local and on a national level. I have noticed that, when people talk about successful urban schools, they nearly always mention the dedication of that school's principal. I've heard stories of school principals acting as school nurses on top of all of their other duties when the school district administration could not afford full time, or even part time, school nurses.

Reading A Disability History of the United States is a very interesting experience for me. I am surprised, frightened, and not so surprised at the same time. In the beginning of the book, I was very intrigued in the living philosophy of the indigenous people as they view disability (of course there is no such word as “disability” at that time) as a more natural and ordinary thing than people arrived at this continent later on. It seems to me that the arrival of the Europeans disrupted the harmony and balance of the social structure of the indigenous people. The only differences between these two groups of people are the definitions on ability and normality.

While reading A Disability History of the United States, I decided to trace employment and perceptions around employability amongst disabled people. I was saddened to read that disabled people were outright excluded from partaking in the voyage across the Atlantic, thus precluding any chance of opportunity that people were seeking. I was also saddened by the fact that disabled people were considered undesirable because of the financial burden they caused the communities who were charged with them. The employment of two disabled men as schoolteachers (whose names I forgot), however, provided, I think, an exception. I was unsurprised by the level of unemployment following that era, but was really angered by the wartime employment.

As a child, I wanted to be a poet. I loved writing, and I wrote constantly. I wrote about the changing of the seasons, I wrote about the fireflies that visited my garden every summer, I wrote about interactions I had that day, I wrote, and then I didn't. It was around the age of 11 that I decided I was a bad writer. Around this age, in my middle school, our teachers began introducing peer critiques, and set a standard for "good writing". I felt inadequate compared to many of my peers. We place children in a system were the benchmark for intelligence is mechanized and standardized examinations, we present them with the end of goal of doing well on that test, and only prepare them to accomplish that.

Title: Do White College Students Believe Stereotypes about Minorities?

Author: Natalie Gross

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/01/white-college-students-buy-in-to-stereotypes-of-minority-peers/426813/

This week was my first visit to my group's Praxis site. The other two had already chosen a project to work on, and so they quickly settled into their projects in that cold office when we got there. R showed me the video as part of my mini-orientation, which she made an appearance in, and we talked about the organization and how it works there. Although the office didn't warm up much while we were there, we gradually became closer to R as she recounted her own personal and painful experience as a youth in an adult prison. It was a ridiculous story from start to finish, ridiculous in the sense that it was hard to believe, yet disappointingly unsurprising at the same time.

One of the very first topics we covered was "Poverty, Health and Policy", and in it we read a chapter by Gorski titled "The Inequality Mess We're In". Gorski outlines in this chapter issues related to class and poverty. Since poverty is one of the key issues in the topic of urban education, I found this article very informative. Not only did Gorski cover poverty, but how it intersects with all sorts of identities, such as gender, race and disability. I think poverty is an important issue to start with because it centers around the other pressing issues that face urban education. It is the issue that can have negative impacts on health, physical and mental, which can lead to conditions worsening.