Flash Contest on Inclusion by @theironfelix
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We keep growing at a fast pace through the selfless delegations from our members!
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Let's cut to the chase. @theironfelix here. We are here to engage the @bananafish members and the general Steemit climate on a variety of topics in this contest. And we want to genuinely see, in good faith in everybody, what your thoughts are for our community’s principles and other topics down the road. Here's the central question for you all:
What experiences of inclusion in your life had made you question your prior beliefs and taught you a great lesson?
Add-on Questions!
- Have you ever had a friend tell you something they were worried might change what you think of them?
- How did you/how would you react and how did/would that change how you saw the person?
- If/when a friend came out to you and said they had been living part of their life in secret, what would/did you do in support of their struggle?
- Could you recommend a book, game, TV show or movie that has included minorities describing them in a positive and genuine perspective? And what about one that was made by people in/from the Global Periphery/South (those outside Europe, USA and Canada)?
- What do you think about tags and conformity in nowadays society?
- Did you ever hear about the self-fulfilling prophecy theory?
Prizes!
I'm so eager to learn about your experiences, as one of the NANA principles is about inclusion.
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Hi: I made a blog out of my response this time. It is a little more thorough and on target, I think. I followed @calluna's suggestion and wrote about manners, because this memory is clearer to me than the earlier one in my life.
Lessons in Life: Inclusion
This is a great opportunity for people to expand their awareness of their own progress. Looking back, it seems to me that inclusion, in the sense of groups, has never been an issue in my life. My inclination has always been to embrace the excluded. And I have been sensitive to exclusion since childhood. I think my first protest against exclusion came when I was in the eighth grade. Teacher and the class were brutalizing a girl who had a mild developmental impairment. I don't remember what I said, but I did take a risk and speak out. My empathy with the girl and sense of injustice were greater than my fear of retaliation.
However, honesty forces me to examine my own attitudes, and to realize that my family had a sense of exceptionalism. This despite our grinding poverty. Perhaps the poverty reinforced the need to insist upon our exceptionalism.
In any event, I eschewed the nonsense of that as I matured. The insistence on "manners"--the proper way to sip soup, for example--became absurd to me. So absurd that my first "dinner party" at my house when I married was carried out picnic style, on the floor. I hadn't bothered to buy a dining room table.
I remember George Carlin once going off on the sport of golf and the sheer waste of all that green space. It's kind of the same as sipping soup--a conspicuous display of class difference, of privilege. No substance to it, just a device to separate people, to layer them by worth.
So, anyway, thanks @bananafish for giving the community a chance to share on this subject. I'm not surprised that @theironfelix was at least part inspiration for the exercise.
Hey, we do enjoy that people are commenting and sharing their experiences. But I want to request for a re-entry because this entry is a bit too muddy with experiences that relate to and relate not to the central theme of “experiences teaching us something in the field of X.” You can reply under this comment your re-entry. I want you to highlight an experience of a moment of Inclusion giving you a good life lesson. Perhaps develop and expand the incident of the mild developmental impaired kid. Tell us the tale of how’d it went and reflect on the importance of such an event that it still sticks in your mind to this day. Thanks for understanding, I want all entryists to have the ability to be fairly judged and not have their entries be declared invalid :^D
Thanks for that invitation and clarification. I see that my comment went a little astray from the intent of the question. I'll give it another shot, later today. I can still see that girl at the blackboard being ridiculed, though this happened so many years ago.
I equally would say that whatever lead you to shed your belief relating to manners would likely answer this question well. Look forward to your updated entry <3
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I have a son who has differences. Up to fifth grade he had no problems socially, could learn very well, scored "above grade level" on all standardized tests, and was kind to everyone. But he would not speak when he was anxious, and that went double for stern unsmiling teachers which is the type he encountered in fifth grade. So rather than tell the teacher to smile at him once in a while, the school convinced me my son should be classified "emotionally disabled". Ever since I made that fateful mistake, thinking he would be even more successful in school, his schooling went south.
The schools convinced me he needed to be in a special ed program if he wanted to be in public school at all. They also told me they would place him in the "least restrictive settings", "inclusive" settings, and that he would get services to help him conform. I listened to the "professionals" against my better judgement. This turned out to be a terrible idea.
Once he was classified special ed, every now and then he would have a wonderful teacher who felt blessed to have him in their class, because he is truly wonderful. But for the most part he began to have no end of trouble with regular classroom teachers who did not feel they should have to teach him, and that he and others like him should be taught separately from the other children. All it took to destroy his educational experience was to give him a label that he was somehow different, and put a note in his file.
So the lesson I learned was, if you suspect your child of having differences, it might be best to not let the schools know. Get private evaluations and private tutoring. Homeschool. Waldorf.
And value your child's differences - differences spring from their strengths, and are not their weaknesses.
I have begun to question the value of public education at all. It is really just a vehicle to make us all think alike and feel comfortable being essentially imprisoned for most of the day, designed to force the differences out of us. And this has all gotten much much worse since the "no child left behind" nonsense.
Thank you for reading my sad sad story. I have edited it because the first iteration was too negative. I apologize for that.
I hope the day comes when we know that those of us who are a bit different are blessings, not burdens.
Thank you so much for sharing this very personal experience. I am very strongly with you here, this sort of response only separates people. It’s is horrible the way the system is designed to meet certain goals, and the focus on measuring those goals means everything else falls by the wayside. What’s more frustrating is that everyone has their own set of weakness and flaws, and yet the people who don't conform to the norm get labeled as a problem. Yet the issue isn’t in the actual observation, but in the way it is approached. Here, as you say “rather than tell the teacher to smile at him” – an observation was made, that wasn’t inaccurate, but the way it was responded to seriously worsened the problem. In a way it’s like the focus from the school was on the wider picture, they were looking at how to solve the problem for them, not for your son. And I don’t know what it’s like where you are but it is a bit of a systematic problem, schools have targets and goals to meet, and take the easiest route of making it the child’s problem. It is very much the case that our differences are our strengths, what in one situation can hold someone back, can put them at a massive advantage elsewhere, education shouldn't be 'one size fits all and if it doesn't well that's your fault'. And completely agree with you, the Rudolf Steiner schools, care villages, homes, pretty much everything are such a wonderful alternative. What they do isn't even revolutionary, it wouldn't be hard for all schools to take a more considered approach.
This is a very good and thought provoking answer, inclusion isn’t arbitrary, it isn’t making a ‘special’ place for ‘special’ people, or labeling people and treating them as the thing they are instead of a person – although there are organizations that might argue that. Inclusion is valuing differences and seeing them as strengths, and working with them instead of separating them out and I am happy you managed to find that for your son. Segregation is never inclusion, and the idea that a school would take separate kids for the sake of inclusion would be laughable if it wasn’t such a sad story.
And this has been a very interesting one for me personally, someone very close to me when through all their schooling undiagnosed, getting the diagnosis as an adult was an emotional experience but they felt it was probably better as having that label in school would have meant they were treated differently, which was exactly what you encountered.
This is one we can all learn something from, thank you very much for this!
And thank you for that response! I've felt quite alone with this "burden" that has taught me a great deal and put me on a different path altogether. For that I am grateful to my son for being who he is. I have become who I am largely because of him.
But his problems are far from over. I could write another one of these regarding the treatment he gets from doctors if I tell them he has emotional differences. Doctors then just want to ply him with a boatload of drugs. So another thing I have learned is don't tell the doctors or they give him less thought, and it is super important to not tell doctors in hospitals, or they almost immediately tell me he should be in "psych". I've found that it is better the doctors think I am over-protective rather than he is "crazy". Just so you know, his offence is to remain too silent, he is not violent or disruptive in any way. He is thoughtful and wary, with good reason. I stay in the hospitals with him, even if they tell me I have to leave. He is less safe there than he was in school.
Both our educational system and our medical system are awful awful awful, yet have enormous power. They are both harming all of our children from the moment of birth. Two traps we willingly walked right into.
Thank you for listening and appreciating!
Hi! I just wrote a freewrite I am very happy with that is related to and partly inspired by this contest. Here it is!
https://steemit.com/freewrite/@owasco/weekend-freewrite-4-20-2019-schoolhouse
Glad that you reached there. Sorry it had to take painful experience. But being bricks in the wall is not what we dream of anymore. At least we have more choice. Some may be comfortable with being bricks, actually. I am not.
Thank you for your response. Public schooling has been a terrible mistake in my opinion. Now the medical system is doing further damage for our whole lives, not only when we are children. I often wonder what future thought about this era will be. The era we willingly poisoned our minds, our bodies and the planet.
My post is more about exclusion, rather than inclusion. And the follies it entails.
JD was shopping for groceries in a local 7-eleven type store when a roma guy wandered in from the street, in worn, dirty, unkempt clothing. He was muttering under his nose, quiet unintelligible words. JD has seen him many times before on the bus, and he was muttering then too. Now he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and his paranoia always goes through the roof, 'Is he mocking me? Does he know me? How does he know I'm sick?' and so on. He never once thought that he might be sick too, and that's just his way of normal, only when he's alone again, relaxed, re-thinking the day and it's events.
The grocery clerk, a young blonde woman with a rather pretty face, sternly orders him out of the store, turns to JD and says "I can't believe they are letting these wander freely, people like that should be locked up, am I right?". Flashbacks of the weeks at the psychiatric ward rushed JD, he smiled and thought to himself 'If you only knew that I am the one who visualizes cutting peoples faces up as I smile on them...'. He politely thanked her as she handed him his bag, bade her farewell and left. He wasn't angry, he wasn't even annoyed, he was rather amused.
The roma guy was trying to convince someone outside to buy him something from the strore with money in hand. He spoke perfectly and quite eloquently, JD's paranoia flared up again, his amusement started to fade.
A good one, too. We assume too much. Or we fail to assume enough. Or both ;)
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Great idea working on this. Would you post a short guide to the meaning of Inclusion? I feel I might be missing some aspects.
Is NANA just short from @bananafish or is it something else that I am missing here?
I will let @theironfelix expand on this but looking up the dictionary definition I can see why you wanted to check. I would say its equality and something being accessible to everyone, so the question is looking at a time when you either you did something with someone/a group that changed your views, or witnesses something that had the same effect. So a poor example might be thinking girls had cooties and were boring as a kid, but then going to school with them and finding out they are just kids too. Or watching the paralympics and realising people with disabilities are just as able as anyone else. Poor examples but hopefully that gives you an idea of it, and I am sure felix will be by with a better explanation.
And yep, nana is just short for bananafish ;)
Thanks a lot, Seems I am not missing anything else than what I understood.
I will answer this comment backwards:
As @calluna said: “nana is just short for bananafish.”
I will be talking about inclusion in the active sense, so keep that in mind. Anyways, inclusion to me mean four things:
Now we are specifically more into the fourth definition of the word "inclusion" for this contest; but we won’t mind you or anybody going into the first three definitions. And I would get into the history of inclusion and diversity, but that would be, err, not a thing a comment could take care of. So I can provide some examples of inclusion for now (and mój Ukochany provided good passive sense examples, not poor ones :p):
I'll be happy to think about the fourth case :)