Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Accommodations

The academic year is just getting started here in Blighty (don't be too jealous, we run until late June), and students are suddenly back and all over the place, getting lost, misreading signs, dropping in with stories about their summers, and registering with various services.

The colleague who is currently wearing the admin. hat of Disability Officer came in yesterday with the list for my Advanced Hamster Handling module.  He said: "you're not going to be pleased about this"... and pointed out a student who has declared a serious hamster allergy.  The student cannot be in the same room as a hamster, according to the paperwork.  My class meets in the hamster pens twice a week in order to, strangely enough, do some advanced hamster handling (holding two hamsters at once, intervening in hamster fights without getting your ears bitten, holding a hamster above your head whilst standing on one leg, that sort of thing).  This student cannot enter the pens...

"Unfortunately," says the DO, "the module is core for Professional Hamsterology and the student refuses to change into another degree programme, so you have to make reasonable adjustments.  Could you video each week's class, so they can watch it and then practice their handling on toy hamsters instead?"

21 comments:

  1. One day, someone who has a blood phobia will be accommodated in a medical surgery class. Hopefully, the boneheads who made those rules will have these people for surgeons.

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    1. Another outcome of this sad situation is that this student may be granted a degree that cannot be used to get a job in the field. But hey, a mere proffie dare not raise a hand against the Disability Office, since what they do is REQUIRED BY LAW. Trying to reason with them over what constitutes "reasonable" accommodation gets nowhere. You have to accommodate their every, EVERY need, when they want it and how they want it, even if it means participating in a fraud, and that's that.

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    2. Nuts, just nuts.
      Are you required to tape the classes yourself? In my school it'd be the job of the DO to provide a video recorder operator for this. You can hardly handle a hamster while holding a camera.
      Or you could say that since the class is on hamster handling, the only reasonable accommodation is to provide a hazmat suit and a respirator to the student. Happily, Breaking Bad has made them fashionable.

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    3. The department has to sort out the taping... maybe I could just train some hamsters?

      Yeah, Froderick's comment gets to the heart of the misery - it seems wrong for the student to get a degree which implies they have skills which they don't, in all sorts of ways, but what the student wants [is willing to pay for?] trumps any argument.

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    4. I didn't see your Breaking Bad reference before making my own.

      Yeah, science!

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  2. Trying to reason with them over what constitutes "reasonable" accommodation gets nowhere. You have to accommodate their every, EVERY need, when they want it and how they want it, even if it means participating in a fraud, and that's that.

    The college decides what is "reasonable," not the student. "Reasonable" must also fall within the functions and duties expected of the course. What would a reasonable accommodation be for a blind student in a criminal justice firearms and marksmanship training course? (Hint: There aren't any.)

    Let the student take it to court. Saul Goodman wouldn't even touch this one to satisfy his pro bono requirement.

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  3. This is one case where the hamster shtick just doesn't work.

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    1. Why not? I do have a student who has a medical condition which prevents them from taking any part in the practical work of a module taught through hands-on learning and which is both part of a professional programme and covers that aspect of professional practice which most commonly offers entry level work and is widely carried out in industry. And the need for accomodations is causing me Misery (and professional concerns)

      What part of the analogy doesn't work?

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    2. Because I can't tell what's analogy and what's actually happening. Is hamster just code for mice? Is it code for hydrochloric acid? Is it code for archival research in a rare books library?
      The hamster stuff doesn't let anyone make an assessment of how essential the activities are and what reasonable accommodations might entail.

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    3. hmmm, I for one am going to take Grumpy at their word that this is Misery. I don't think the itty bitty technical details are needed to make it abundantly clear that this is a ridiculous situation. If the course is Hamster Wrangling 101 (or its equivalent, whatever the hell it may be, let your imagination run wild), it is gonna be hella-difficult to evaluate a student who cannot touch a hamster, or be in the same room as a hamster.

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    4. It worked for me. I've got students who can't read/write in a Reading/Writing class who have tutors doing their Reading/Writing FOR them outside of class. The student will in no way end the course able to do any of the Student Learning Outcomes (which all involve reading/writing).

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    5. I thought it was a particularly good use of the hamster analogy.

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    6. Worked for me, too (like several others, I could easily think up analogous real-world situations, from my own experience and hypothetical). And yes, the question "why the #$%! do you want this degree which you will not be able to use professionally?" comes to mind. I'm all for college-level study as something more than pre-professionalissm, but there are limits (and many students with disabilities really can do college-level, and eventually professional, work in some area, but, just like the rest of us, they need to be realistic about their strengths, weaknesses, and limitations, and adjust their dreams accordingly. As Sawyer points out, a blind person really can't hold down a job which genuinely requires marksmanship (or the ability to drive a car, or see through a microscope), but (s)he can still work in all kinds of other law enforcement-related areas, from criminal profiler (though I think there are probably far fewer jobs in that area than students who want to take up the trade) to lawyer/judge.

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  4. I once took a neuroanatomy class for which there was a three-hour, once-a-week, hands-on lab. I am apparently oversensitive to the fixative that was used to pickle the brains, and left the lab every week with a migraine. One week it was bad enough that I don't actually remember how I got home.

    It never occurred to me to ask for accommodations. I don't see being let out of something that vital as being a reasonable accommodation. (Yeah, I could have pre-treated with medication. That didn't occur to me either.)

    I spent a lot of time with the lab manual to make up for the times I couldn't focus well enough to see what was being pointed to on/dissected out of the brains in the lab. I got a B in the course (which for a graduate class isn't that great, but I did do well enough to learn the stuff).

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  5. I don't know what Canadian/British (going by your spelling) law is on this, but American law would not protect this student. I'm totally pro-accommodation but you do not have to change the essential nature of a course to accommodate a disability.

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    1. I think "here in Blightly" was a dead give away, but Americans/Canadians tend to know this term only if they've made a habit of reading British WWI-era novels (e.g. Goodbye To All That, et al.).

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  6. The disability racket is even worse than the HR racket.

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  7. I went to college in the US with a student who had motor disabilities. The student was an art major. S/he had no fine motor skills, yet I remember my professors being required to "accomodate" hir in the different art courses required of an art major. I can't imagine what s/he did for printmaking. Or darkroom photography. Or ceramics. Or drawing. Etc.

    At times, the disability stuff really is a DIS-ability to do something, and that person should be told that s/he cannot major in that area.

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  8. I had an issue with our accessibility office last spring. Basically, I had a student who couldn't access all the aspects of the online homework system that our department uses (that we are "strongly encouraged" to use because it saves on TA costs) and I was told that I would not be able to use that aspect of the homework system for any of the other 170 students in the room because it wasn't completely accessible for that one student. They also wouldn't let me give him alternate assignments, because that wouldn't be fair to him to get something slightly different from everyone else. Instead, I had to remove all images, animations, interactive tutorials, and videos from the homework and only use text based questions with no illustrations or graphs (in a science class). I could use those things in class during lecture, so long as I described the shit out of them, but I could not assign them (or even make them available to students) outside of class because that would also be unfair to this particular student.

    I had two sections of the same course that semester, with the same lectures, in class activities, and exams, and only one section was subject to the accessibility rules. Guess which class had a significantly higher average grade and significantly higher gains on a pre-post test assessment?

    I'm all for reasonable accommodations when they can be provided, but the lawyers' definition of reasonable accommodations and actual reasonable accommodations don't even occupy the same planet.

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  9. I teach visual art. Advising has attempted to place a student who has been blind since birth in one of my classes. My all-time favorite is the placement of a student with color vision deficiency in a color theory class. I've found the problem has been at the advising end.

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