Anyway.  Anniversaries are occasions to stop and reflect on what you’ve accomplished and what remains to be [...]]]> The Americans with Disabilities Act was passed on this day in 1980.  I think it was 1980; everyone’s saying that it’s “21 years old and leaving me to do the math.  As a dyscalculic, this often leads to trouble.

Anyway.  Anniversaries are occasions to stop and reflect on what you’ve accomplished and what remains to be done.  In terms of accomplishments, there are many.  Wheelchair accessibility is a big one here.  As Dr Ruth Webb describes in her autobiography, people in chairs were simply not expected to live independent lives.  Webb, who has cerebral palsy, was determined to live a full life.  She went to college, and even got a PhD, in spite of being told that it would be bad for her to become “overeducated”.

As she went about her education, and her career, wheelchair access, was a constant concern.  Even if she could fit her chair through the door, she sometimes had trouble getting someone to hold it for her as she went through it.  For many people, someone with a disability was less than a person; they were expected to stay home, have their families care for them, and make do with dependency.

This post from one of the alternative local dailies covers some of the things that we still need to work on.  People with disabilities are still unemployed and underemployed in larger numbers than the non-disabled.  The author also makes the point that advances in technology do not always include universal access.  Many websites are designed without considering the needs of users with disabilities — and with the current level of technology, there’s no excuse for this.

A few weeks back, I wrote about the temptations of graduate school for adults with learning disabilities — particularly those of us who are “twice-exceptional”.  If you’re great at a certain subject, if you enjoy it, if you get validation from your professors in that area, why not consider a PhD [...]]]>

Want fries with that?

A few weeks back, I wrote about the temptations of graduate school for adults with learning disabilities — particularly those of us who are “twice-exceptional”.  If you’re great at a certain subject, if you enjoy it, if you get validation from your professors in that area, why not consider a PhD program?

If you’re also incredibly weak in the clerical skills required of most entry-level jobs, if your self-esteem has taken a beating over the years because of your learning problems, if you get into the work force and find that the only positions you’re considered for are retail and food service … well, grad school has GOT to be better than this, right?

So you did it.  You got into grad school.  Only now your friends who graduated last year are back in their crappy service sector jobs while juggling two or three adjunct faculty positions.  They can barely make rent, they have no benefits, and you’re beginning to wonder if you’ve been snowed.

What do you do now?

What you do is you come up with a Plan B.  As Alexandra M Lord writes in her article, Every PhD Needs a Plan B, it is possible — and for adults with learning disabilities, I would say it is necessary — to simultaneously prepare for academia and the job market.  You get an internship.

Lord writes that a paid or unpaid internship (especially a non-teaching one, if you’re already getting teaching experience as a TA) is an ideal way to round out your resume with new skills and experiences.  It will also provide you with valuable personal contacts outside of academia.  And since most internships have a learning focus, it’s unlikely that you’ll spend all of your time doing those administrative tasks that your learning disabilities make such a nightmare.  In other words, when you’re not helping with admin stuff, you’ll have an opportunity to show your strengths.

Read her full article here.  For an article on someone whose squash hobby (the sport, not the food) became her career, check out “A PhD in Squash?”

Benton, himself a college professor, warns that a humanities degree is an investment that’s not worth the risk. PhD’s spend an average of ten years (and tens of thousands [...]]]> Someone pointed recently pointed me toward this article, written about a year ago by Thomas H. Benton, called Graduate School In The Humanities: Just Don’t Go.

Benton, himself a college professor, warns that a humanities degree is an investment that’s not worth the risk. PhD’s spend an average of ten years (and tens of thousands of dollars) preparing for the job market, but less than half of them will ever find a tenure track position. The jobs that do exist are adjunct faculty positions that pay less than minimum wage. He compares the job market for humanities PhD’s to that of actors and professional athletes.

He says that young people go to grad school for a variety of reasons. Some are intimidated by the thought of life outside of academic institutions and idealize their college life. Those who receive good grades and praise from their professors might feel more validated inside academia than outside it. Others think that grad school is a good place to hide out in tough economic times, as indeed he did when we went in the early 90’s recession. Academia, he contends, is only too happy to exploit these young people, taking their tuition money, underpaying them for their research and teaching labor, and then continuing to underpay them as tenure-track positions are scaled back, placing new PhD’s into a permanent pool of adjunct workers who make less than minimum wage.

I’m writing about this here because I suspect that 2E students are particularly vulnerable to humanities graduate programs. 2E, or “twice-exceptional”, refers to folks who are both gifted and learning disabled. We are often very, very good in certain academic subjects, and god-awful in other subjects. Our deficits can be in areas that are required for entry-level work, such as attention to detail and clerical skills. Basically, we’re absent-minded professors. And what better place for an absent-minded professor than academia?

I fell pray to this line of reasoning. My learning disabilities were undiagnosed until halfway through my junior year of college. My grades were low, too low to carry out my original plan of going to law school, and when I entered the job market I found that the only work I was qualified to do was entry-level admin stuff. All those job postings were aimed at “highly organized” candidates with “excellent clerical skills” who were experts in creating Excel spreadsheets. Hmm … dyscalculia, dysgraphia, and ADHD … nope.

I tried temping, but I failed every single computer test they gave me. I got one shift as a receptionist.

I wound up in retail, working just above minimum wage, feeling like my potential would never be realized. That is, until I started thinking about MFA programs.

An MFA is a terminal degree (ha!) in the fine arts, meaning that it’s “equivalent” to a PhD, only the knowledge is in an applied field such as painting rather than something like art history, where you write about painting. An MFA degree qualifies you to teach college courses. I was told that it was a great way to work a secure job that complemented my creative work. There would be A Lot Of Retirements coming down the pipe Real Soon Now, opening up new positions in the job market. It would be a track to a professional job that didn’t require me to trip and fall over the entry-level hoops that everyone else can just jump through on their way to better things.

And it was all wrong.

Turns out, not only are there no jobs in the humanities, but that MFA’s are taken much less seriously than PhD’s when applying for the few positions that are out there. I learned that adjunct faculty work for below minimum wage. I learned that the time and money I’d put into my degree would have been better spend just taking the art and music classes that interested me.

These days, I hire myself out as an art teacher, as a gardener, or sometimes as a personal assistant. Work is sporadic. I live because my husband had the sense to go into network engineering, and that whole internet thing turned out to be kind of a big deal. If I weren’t married, I’d be lucky to have a roof over my head.

And I’m not the only one. While they’re not 2E, I know others who fell into the humanities trap.

My husband’s brother is getting a PhD in English Lit. His funding was recently cut off, which means that he is no longer an “employee” of the school, which means that he will be uninsured at the end of the year. As he finishes his dissertation he’ll be an adjunct faculty member, paid a third less than he’s paid now (not including benefits) to teach more courses.

Then there’s a friend of mine from middle school who got his Doctorate in music. He had intended to be a music professor, but found the same things the rest of us do — there’s a shortage of jobs, and the ones he could find were in backwater rural hellholes, where only the most musically untalented students dared to tread (seriously, he had a prospective piano major who couldn’t play a scale!). He’s now struggling to set up a piano studio and wishing he’d saved his money. He sums up his situation: “If I’d gotten a decent job somewhere ten years ago, instead of going to grad school, at least by now I’d be able to afford a piano!”

There are four reasons, Benton writes, that justify the enormous time and expense of a humanities graduate degree. They are:

* You are independently wealthy, and you have no need to earn a living for yourself or provide for anyone else.
* You come from that small class of well-connected people in academe who will be able to find a place for you somewhere.
* You can rely on a partner to provide all of the income and benefits needed by your household.
* You are earning a credential for a position that you already hold — such as a high-school teacher — and your employer is paying for it.

As for my friends and I, we all would have been better off if we’d seen Thomas Benton’s article years ago, and taken it to heart.

The whole article appears here. In a follow-up piece, he discusses the economics of academia in more detail. Also worth checking out is his tongue-in-cheek essay, Is Grad School A Cult? If you’re already in grad school, this article gives some pointers about how to prepare for both the academic and non-academic job markets.

The first federal special education bill was signed into law by President Gerald Ford on December 2nd, 1975, in order to support state and local jurisdictions in “protecting the rights of, meeting the individual needs of, and improving the results for infants, toddlers, children and youths with [...]]]> I just learned that today is Special Education Day.

The first federal special education bill was signed into law by President Gerald Ford on December 2nd, 1975, in order to support state and local jurisdictions in “protecting the rights of, meeting the individual needs of, and improving the results for infants, toddlers, children and youths with disabilities and their families.”  It is this law that requires the provision of “free and appropriate” education to all students, including those with mental and physical disabilities of all sorts.

What were the educational prospects for disabled students before this law was passed?  Well, not that great.  Helen Keller, pictured above with actress Patty Duke during filming of The Miracle Worker, was from a well-to-do family that could afford private tutors and special schools. Others had to rely on public schools, which only educated one in five students with disabilities.  Even worse, there were plenty of states with laws that actively and explicitly excluded students with major disabilities such as blindness, deafness, or mental retardation.

I once got a tiny view into this world. While I was in college, I read a book called Journey Into Personhood by Ruth Cameron Webb.  Webb has cerebral palsy, and she grew up in the pre-special ed, pre-ADA days. Webb struggled to live independently, and when out in the world, people were actively rude to her when she needed help with her wheelchair or even when she asked someone to hold the door for her.  She was actively discouraged from going to college, being told that someone like her had no need of a college education, that she was in danger of being “overeducated”.   In spite of meeting with such prejudice, she not only went to college, but earned a PhD as well.  Her career was spent working with and advocating for other people with disabilities.

Unlike Ruth Webb, I’ve had the privilege of taking things like wheelchair ramps and special ed for granted.  Special education law has been continually revised and expanded.  In 1990 it was renamed, becoming the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA.  If you’ve ever had an IEP, it’s because of IDEA.  IDEA now protects the educational rights of more than 6.5 million children.