Moments of Permanence - On another note

From: sami Date: June 14th, 2014 09:49 am (UTC) (Link)

I was at high school in the 90s. We had a class of mentally disabled kids. I was friendly with a couple of them, disliked another to a point that neared outright hatred. (Because in year 9, a small group of us were spending lunch time in the Art classroom for a few days, finishing a finicky project that involved sculpting a bird from clay. I was very proud of mine - I'd spent hours on it, carefully carving each individual feather with the point of a pocket knife. Katie asked to look at it, because she was admiring my detail work. Melissa got annoyed with Katie over something, and crushed my bird, thinking it was Katie's. I pretty much hated Melissa thereafter.)

To the best of my recollection, though, they were generally addressed by their names. If they were getting picked on or bullied, they wouldn't be bullied by being called morons or idiots or retards or any of those, because even the most sociopathic bullies at my school were well aware that that would unite the entire *rest* of the school against them.

If a kid in the gifted class does something stupid in public, they'll struggle to live that down, but certainly when I was growing up, if a kid had an actual disability, then that topic was generally taboo for picking on them.

Melissa, for example, wasn't particularly popular, in part because her personality could be a tad abrasive at the best of times, but the only person I can recall insulting her intelligence is me, during the altercation that followed her crushing my bird, and that was because a) she had just destroyed the first truly beautiful work of art I had ever created in my life, and being as vicious verbally as I could possibly could was the only thing allowing me to restrain myself from trying to murder her so I was pretty much insulting her on every level known to the English language and b) at the time I didn't know she was in the remedial education group, because the only class I shared with her was Art, and while we interacted socially due to mutual friends it never came up.

(Reply) (Parent)