This is a response to Jose’s post about dis-”Abilities”. It really informs what he was getting at.
“part of our job as educators is to look at the word “disability” as a description for only a part of any human being we seek to teach, whereas “unable” denotes that they’ve been incapacitated from any meaningful task or purpose. Thus, we need to focus on students’ abilities even when they’re disabled in one part of their live.
But, here is another idea… and don’t let this idea distract you from the sheer human feeling of this video or the great act of empathy that the coach showed in this video. What if it wasn’t the last game? What if J-Mac had been playing since he was a freshman? What if he had been on the court instead of the sidelines? What if we had seen his potential in him from the very beginning of his educational career? In the future we will. As Jose said, “In the future, we should keep in mind and do more to study about persons with disabilities in the hopes that they too can participate in the building of this society and the next one. Without you knowing, they may already have …”
