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“…No group stands alone, nor even in a simple relation to more dominant other groups, but always in relation to the wider system of which all groups, dominant and minority, are a part.”

McDermott and Varenne describe culture as a set of collective norms rather than individual behaviors. Since our last class, I’ve been thinking about what is “normal” – the authors describe assumption that culture is universal as fundamentally flawed because that results in the perception that those who do not confine to those norms are missing something, in effect, “disabled.” The concept of “health” is defined as being “free from illness or injury,” and the origin of the word is related to “whole” – but then, most people are never “healthy” or “whole.” Is it “normal,” then, for the body to be “unhealthy” or not “whole?” Then why do shows like “Britain’s Missing Top Model” exist? Where do we draw the lines between which injuries/illnesses/disabilities are “normal” and which stray from the norm? Does it matter whether or not they are hidden, or how common they are? But then, how do we know how common they are if they are hidden? Normalcy is driven by perception, and, I would argue, in contrast to McDermott and Varenne’s arguments, these perceptions are individual rather than collective, based on one’s own experiences and diffracted upon their own world.

I found this to be a very hard essay to write. There are so many different ways to define and interpret the word “access.” I started out by trying to look up the word access in a dictionary and I was a bit intrigued by some of the definitions I did not know were associated with access. For example, I found that in the Webster’s Dictionary, access is defined by an increase or growth. This definition really resonated with me as I wrote my paper because I defined access to education as being something I have acquired through my parents. The access they have given me has increased and grown because we are of different generations and also because I was raised in a different environment than they were. Access, in my opinion, is something that you cannot control. Although, my access differs from my parents it still affects my own. I believe that ones parents background can affect their children’s access to education based on their race and socioeconomic status as children. But access to education can be so much more than that. Access to education can be based off of ones experiences, abilities, common sense, realizations, communities, and so much more. So my question is- what is the difference between access to formal education and access to informal education? How do we get access to life experiences and education we do not acquire in school? Is it through experiences in our communities? Nurturing from our parents? Either way, I think that there are multiple ways to view access to education; whether it be through informal or formal education. 

" In addition to looking a little different, learning disabilities are common affects of Turner’s Syndrome. Before being diagnosed, many Turner Syndrome girls are actually led to believe they had ADHD or other more general learning disabilities. In my case, I had 11 years before my diagnosis told me the laundry list of things I shouldn’t be able to do and until the point had not been aware of the term “limits.” There are some Turner’s patients who are diagnosed earlier than I was, some even at birth. The average age of diagnosis for Turner’s, however, is around 15 or 16 years old. As a result, each patient has wildly different experiences in their formative years thus noticeably different educational experiences.  " 

For my essay, I decided to focus on how disability can define a student's access to education. As a person with a disability, I focused my paper more or less on Turner's Syndrome and it's impact. Surprisingly, I made some new discoveries about my own disability in researching for the paper. Newer research shows a connection between Turner's and ADD/ADHD. I was previously unaware of the link and a lot of the challenges I have faced academically now make sense. Upon this discovery I discussed it with one of my good friends back home who manages her ADD without meds. When I told her, she responded "You didn't know you had ADD?" I know I can be a little over the top at times and do often drift from work causing me to move at a slower pace, but I had never connected the dots...

In reading "Culture as a Disability," the opening section about "The Country of the Blind" made me think about something I'm looking at for my thesis, which in part discusses sizeism (e.g., the way in which thin people tend to be privileged over "fat" people, whatever that means to anybody reading this). In "The Country of the Blind," fourteen generations of congenitally blind people are able to adapt their environment to meet their needs; in Eli Clare's definition, they would have "impairment" (maybe?) but not "disability."

In my paper I focused on something both Edmundson and Dewey touched on in our readings, that in order to recieve an education that matters one must have some sort of self-doubt or curiosity.  Even though Edmudson relates this to all his students, I chose to focus on how the lower class has even less access to an education that matters than those who are from the upperclass.  

While writing my paper it really struck me how much class mentality molds a persons education. For instance, when Luttrell goes to interview one of her students, their two children are playing together and the interviwee writes off her childs intelligence as "just common sense".  Already from a young age her son's intelligence isn't as valued as Luttrell's daughter, something that will follow them later in life.  And when Dorothy Allison is assigned to make her family tree, her mother demands she doesn't pursue exploration of her uncertinty about her heritage.  

It occured to me that if the lower class what to receive an education that matters, class mentality has to be changed rather than providing greater opportunities for the lower class. Like Viniece Walker explained to Earl Shorris, the lower class have to learn the "morals of down town". 

Last week I was reading some chapters from "Agendas, Alternatives, and Public policies" for my political science seminar and came across a passage that really resonated with me.  
"There is a difference between a condition and a problem. ...As one lobbyist said, 'if you only have four fingers on one hand, that's not a problem; that's a situation.' Conditions become defined as problems when we come to believe that we should do something about them. Problems are not simply the conditions or external events themselves; there is also a perceptual, interpretive element." (109).

Although the author is speaking specifically to the challenge of agenda setting in public policy, the sentiment stretches beyond his intended meaning. It fits nicely into the themes of this week's reading: culture as disability. The broad consensus (although they diverge on the particulars) between Grobstein, Varenne, and McDermott is that culture creates the confines within which certain characteristics or abilities are valued. It sets us up for cognition based on normative values. For example, one is born a certain sex (whether it is male, female, or intersex), and in the US, the condition of sex becomes a problem when the child is born intersex (i.e. as a culture, we decide something needs to be done to fix the child's sexual assignment). However, when looking at non-western cultures, for example India, intersex (Hijra) is accepted as a legitimate alternative to the dichotomous male/female binary.  

            Our discussion in class last Tuesday, in which we looked for examples of diffraction and entanglement within Exile and Pride, reminded me of a set of videos shown to my freshman as part of a multicultural awareness presentation.  The first one is an “It Get’s Better” video put together by Pixar employees (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a4MR8oI_B8).  The video encourages gay youth to resist the urge to commit suicide, on the promise that life will get better.  The second video is the response by a self-identified poor lesbian woman of color.  I had been having trouble conceptualizing what diffraction might look like in practice, especially outside of the ivory tower.  These videos seem to capture this concept.  The woman in the second video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr5ix1UUnPI) takes issue with the concept of “it gets better,” claiming this experience as exclusively available based on class and race.  She brings the intersection of class, race, and even ableism into play in looking at the difficult experiences of gay youths (i.e how they are all entangled).  Such experiences take on a whole new meaning and set of problems when diffracted through her experience as a poor woman of color.  As a result, the interaction between these many different social factors and how they might play out in individual experience in many different ways splits the singular white, upper-class gay fairytale into a spectrum of lines and possibilities.  These videos show that diffract

As I wrote my essay on access to education, the idea struck me that if we do not appreciate our access to education, in its various forms (both formal and informal), we are missing out even more than if we did not have this access at all. This is especially evident in the case of Luttrell's students--women who undervalued their own common sense, strengthening their desire for a formal education, in Luttrell's class, to help them "become somebody". These women did make significant contributions to their families and to their workplace environment (even when it was a more menial job than that of more formally educated women). However, because they felt a need to be up to par with women like Wendy Luttrell, who could make a name for themselves on the basis of their smarts and their "somebody"-ness, they seemed to want to cut ties with their past education. It costs more than just money to have access to formal education, especially in the case of Doreen's son Tony, who probably would not be pushed to do work in the fields that he showed interest and promise in because his predilection towards them was viewed as mere common sense. In order to truly have an "education that matters" as Edmundson would say, I believe the learner needs to appreciate both what they learn and what they come in already knowing.

"Education plays a vital role in father’s life: on the one hand, it leads him to the life he wanted for him and let him leads him to the life he wants; but on the other hand, he completely lost his way to everything in his past life. For many people who intend to change their life by schooling, the access to education is like a one-way ship ticket, once people decide to aboard the ship, there is no chance to get back.

Far more than learning specific knowledge in the classrooms from teachers, I realized that education is actually closely related to class. Class mobility, which is considered as one of the most wonderful things that people can gain from education, is not always equals to happiness. For people who change their life by receiving education, they automatically put themselves in an awkward position, where is extremely hard to find a sense of belonging. Since they move out from their previous class, everything belongs to the class is no longer open to them; but at the same time, everything in the class they end up with is completely brand new.