Current:Home > NewsMy autistic brother fought an unaccepting world. My graduating students give me hope.-InfoLens
My autistic brother fought an unaccepting world. My graduating students give me hope.
View Date:2024-12-23 17:59:29
People often ask me if this generation of young people, whose childhoods have been shaped by early exposure to social media and whose social development was truncated by COVID-19, are going to be all right in the long run. I guess the people asking think that because I am a high school teacher, I know something about this.
I am no social scientist, but I do worry about this generation for those and other reasons – including that they are coming of age at a time of rising authoritarianism, rampant hatred and ignorance, and a warming planet – but I try to stay hopeful.
For me and a lot of other educators, this time of year provides a source of hope. I suppose one could see it otherwise. At almost every graduation are the ghosts of kids who dropped out or met a tragic end. Among the graduates are those – sometimes many – whose immediate prospects are particularly uncertain. Optimism – like idealism – is, for most educators, a survival tool, and so what we see in the rows of caps and gowns are kids who are undaunted and unstoppable.
This year, I actually am feeling an extra charge of optimism seeing two students graduate – one from our high school and another from college – despite being born with autism.
I watched my brother and my parents struggle
For me, this is personal. I watched my big brother struggle in a world that had little room for someone with autism. I saw my parents try desperately, almost entirely on their own, without support, to help Andy experience joy and meaning and success of some kind. I saw their hearts break as they watched his life slowly shrink away in isolation.
Even after Congress made inclusiveness access the law of the land (first through the Americans with Disabilities Act Title II Regulations, and then through the U.S. code requiring the least restrictive environment in special education), we could only marginally improve my brother’s circumstances before he died.
My mother never gave up on my brother.Because of her, I never give up on my students.
To be clear, my brother had other cognitive challenges beyond his autism, but I cannot help imagining how much better his life would have been if he had been born 20 or 30 or 40 years later.
I try not to dwell on the what-ifs. It's made easier by having had the privilege of knowing and teaching Zimako Ezechukwu, who graduated high school this month with honors, and Aderix Campos, who earned a political science degree from California State University, Long Beach just three years after graduating from our high school.
I am more than impressed by the accomplishments of these two young men, including the A that Aderix earned in my AP Literature class and the A that Zimako earned from me in creative writing and film. Both are well-read, well-informed, articulate, imaginative and creative.
What moves me equally is the effortless inclusiveness I have seen from their peers.
Zimako and Aderix had both been afflicted earlier in their lives with isolation and bullying, but I am proud to say not in high school. Our students, despite all their own challenges growing up in the inner city, many with immigrant parents hated by nearly half the country, never had to be told to be kind or patient or friendly toward Aderix or Zimako.
It seemed to come naturally to them, so that Aderix, despite spending his senior year in COVID-19 distance learning, graduated high school as part of a friend group and was liked and respected by pretty much everyone else.
This year, Zimako was voted “life of the party” and “best smile” for the yearbook and then elected prom king.
Why I am so passionately defending this generation
It wasn’t that long ago things were different at our school. Kids who stuck out in any way faced ridicule and even peril. Teachers worked hard to protect kids on the spectrum, while LGBTQ+ students nervously concealed themselves and were sometimes outed by their peers – and even by some teachers who thought their religious beliefs entitled them to harass kids in that way.
Such insensitivity and bigotry is no longer tolerated by our school or school district. In fact, I don’t know of any teachers now who'd want to do anything but support kids for who they are.
The fear of a Black mother:My son has autism. Schools misunderstand him. I fear police will, too.
I do not believe it is the adults alone who have inspired this radical change among students, and this is one reason I am so passionately a defender of this generation. I hear all the slights about kids today being overly sensitive, entitled and lazy. No more than any other generation, I say, and I’ve been teaching kids for more than 30 years.
I have tried to appreciate the kids I have the privilege of teaching and see the good in them no matter what, and I have never been prouder of a cohort of kids than the ones I see now.
You can legislate access and inclusion, but not acceptance and not friendship.
You can set behavioral expectations for young people and enforce them, but you can’t make them feel it in their hearts.
This is why I am so hopeful about this generation of young people. Hopeful and even confident. Not only that they will be all right in the long run – as all right as any generation has ever been – but that they also will find ways to reverse the catastrophes with which our generations have burdened them.
It is also why I am saddened and disgusted by politicians and media machines that contort inclusion into culture war fabrications to exploit at the expense of kids and families at the margins, though I am optimistic that the young people I’m now teaching will reject the bigotry and ignorance we’ve allowed, for too long, to fester.
Perhaps Aderix with his political science degree will one day be part of a legislature that really does work for all its constituents and puts compassion over culture wars.
Perhaps Zimako will inspire compassion and decency through his art and, as a software engineer, help move technology away from the cravenness of bottom-line Big Tech toward a more humane realization of its awesome potential.
I hope I get to see, in my lifetime, their contributions and those of their peers.
Larry Strauss, a high school English teacher in South Los Angeles since 1992, is the author of more than a dozen books, including “Students First and Other Lies: Straight Talk From a Veteran Teacher” and his new novel, "Light Man."
veryGood! (94195)
Related
- Deommodore Lenoir contract details: 49ers ink DB to $92 million extension
- Columbia protest faces 2 p.m. deadline; faculty members 'stand' with students: Live updates
- Tractor-trailers with no one aboard? The future is near for self-driving trucks on US roads
- CBS Sports announces Matt Ryan will join NFL studio show. Longtime analysts Simms and Esiason depart
- 3 Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib win $42M judgement against defense contractor
- Documentary focuses on man behind a cruelly bizarre 1990s Japanese reality show
- NHL awards 2024: Finalists announced for Vezina Trophy as top goaltender
- Philips will pay $1.1 billion to resolve US lawsuits over breathing machines that expel debris
- 2 more escaped monkeys recaptured and enjoying peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in South Carolina
- Spain’s Prime Minister Sánchez says he’ll continue in office after days of reflection
Ranking
- Congress is revisiting UFOs: Here's what's happened since last hearing on extraterrestrials
- Clayton MacRae: Fed Rates Cut at least 3 more Times
- First-ever psychological autopsy in a criminal case in Kansas used to determine mindset of fatal shooting victim
- Clayton MacRae: FED Rate Cut and the Stock Market
- Human head washes ashore on Florida beach, police investigating: reports
- Philips will pay $1.1 billion to resolve US lawsuits over breathing machines that expel debris
- AIGM’s AI Decision Making System, Will you still be doing your own Homework for Trades
- Scott McLaughlin wins at Barber after week of questions around Team Penske controversy
Recommendation
-
Watch a rescuer’s cat-like reflexes pluck a kitten from mid-air after a scary fall
-
Tornadoes leave a trail of destruction in Oklahoma, communities begin to assess damage
-
The unfortunate truth about claiming Social Security at age 70
-
Jennifer Aniston Shares Rare Glimpse Into Her Private World
-
13 escaped monkeys still on the loose in South Carolina after 30 were recaptured
-
The real migrant bus king of North America isn't the Texas governor. It's Mexico's president.
-
Martin Freeman reflects on age-gap controversy with Jenna Ortega in 'Miller's Girl'
-
New York Rangers sweep Washington Capitals, advance to second round of NHL playoffs