Happy Disability Employment Awareness Month

seriously -- you should be happy.

sometimes a tree needs extra help at the beginning but can end up very fruitful later as a result

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Advisory About Comments

I need all my time, energy, and attention during the week to focus on my new job. Going forward, for new things I publish, I’ll turn the comments on for paid subs on Fridays around 5pm and leave them on until Sunday night around 9pm. This will be announced on Notes. Comments on this post will be open until about 9pm on Sunday, October 6.

I apologize for the annoyance, but this is really helping me function better in my new job, which has to be my priority. Thanks for understanding.

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I know.

Really, I do.

Everyone is thoroughly sick of having their awareness raised about this issue and that issue. It’s so freakin’ ridiculous now that every month and every week is the National (Something) Awareness Week or Month for about fifteen different things.

If you wanted to commemorate them all, you could quite literally plan three parties a day and never do anything else with your life, which is insanity.

And the thought of one more probably makes you want to puke, right?

I get it. I’m pretty sick of all this crap, myself.

But this one is actually different, and I’ll tell you why.

National Disability Employment Awareness Month

National Disability Employment Awareness Month started in 1945, when Congress designated the first week of October “National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week”. Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton all made important changes to the federal infrastructure that seeks to help disabled Americans become gainfully employed, but the most important change was definitely the Americans With Disabilities Act.

The Americans with Disabilities Act

Signed by President George H.W. Bush in 1990, the ADA applies to employers who have at least 15 employees, and to public services (including all levels of government and public schools), accommodation, transportation, and telecommunications.

The law prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in all cases where reasonable accommodation could permit the disabled person to do the job.

It is responsible for the concept of “reasonable accommodation,” which was explained to me by the disability compliance officer at my university as something that lets a disabled student have a fair shot at performing as well as a peer without that disability.

What It Looks Like In Real Life: College

In college, I got disability accommodations.

I wrote about disability accommodations a few years ago when the Senate changed its dress code, allegedly to help Senator Fetterman with his depression. The part of that essay that talks about both my disabilities themselves and my college accommodations is quoted below. I encourage you to read the whole thing if you are interested in a disabled person’s take on “ableism” and what it actually is, means, and looks like.

I am deaf. Many people hear “deaf” and think that it means “what’s a sound?” In our technological age of powerful hearing aids and cochlear implants, this is almost never what “deaf” actually means. In my case, it means that I am hard-of-hearing to the point that I require technological help to use the phone. This the usual standard that people with hearing loss use to differentiate between hard-of-hearing and deaf. Thus, I use the word “deaf” to describe my state of hearing.

With hearing aids, I am able to use the phone and participate in most conversations. The key word there is “most.” I struggle mightily with accents and when more than one person is talking. I use the auto-captioning feature on Microsoft Teams to get written records of important work calls. I use captioning on all TV shows, movies, etc., that I watch, read lyrics to all new music, and otherwise use a mixture of accommodations to help me anytime I need to take in new information by ear.

I also live with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a consequence of experiencing child abuse when I was a child and having been raped as an adult. I have, at times, required “reasonable accommodations” for both these disabilities.

As an undergraduate, I received disability accommodations for my anxiety disorder (PTSD) and for my deafness. I was offered many more accommodations than I accepted (which is another essay, one I may write someday). Here are the ones I accepted, and why they were reasonable.

1. Peer Notes. My university had a system whereby students who were good note-takers could get community service credit for uploading their notes to a special portal. Students with an accommodation to receive peer notes could then access those notes. This was a reasonable accommodation because my hearing often meant that I missed things or misunderstood things. As a mathematics major, most of my classes were taught in the most difficult way possible for a student with limited hearing: with the professor’s back to the class, while writing on the board. Peer notes let me focus all my energy on listening, knowing that if I missed something, I would get it from the peer notes. This meant that when I wasn’t sure if the professor had said “15” or “50,” or when I wasn’t sure if I had heard “secant” or “cosecant,” I could relax and continue listening, knowing that the peer notes would be available to supplement my own. This accommodation let me have the same level of access to the lecture as a student with normal hearing.

2. Preferred Seating. This accommodation allowed me to choose my seat in every class and required the professor to make any adjustments required to enable me to keep that seat. The reason I needed this accommodation is that at the time I was unable to sit with my back to the door of any room. (With hard work in therapy, my PTSD continues to get better, including in this respect.) There were some classrooms with all student seating in positions where the students’ backs were always to the door. When this happened, I would sometimes move a desk so that I could see both the professor and the back door. Other times, I would sit in the back row on the very end and angle my desk slightly so that I had an easy view of the door. This enabled me to participate because I was not overcome with anxiety and adrenaline from being unable to tell who was entering the room and why/how I could escape if needed. It also freed the professor from having to try to “take care of” me in any sense; I decided where I would sit and all he or she had to do was accommodate my decision (generally requiring them to do nothing at all). This accommodation let me eliminate something that would have caused an ongoing, serious impediment to paying attention in class.

3. Extra Time. I almost never used this accommodation, but when I needed it, I really needed it, so I always kept it on my record. One example of a time when I really needed it? A drunk man accosted me on the city bus, put his hands on me, and threatened to kill me, on my way to take my Calculus 2 final exam. I arrived in a state of full PTSD triggering. “Triggering” here is not used in the colloquial sense of being made mildly uncomfortable. PTSD triggering means that even though my adult brain understood that I was on campus taking a final exam, my nervous system thought that I was seven or eight years old and had just been roughed up and threatened by my father again. I was full of adrenaline, with the taste of metal in my mouth and my heart rate 50% higher than normal. In that state, I was supposed to sit down and do trigonometric substitution integrals that required thirty steps to complete, to remember which convergence test to use for which sequence, and do all the rest of what Calculus 2 requires. The extra time accommodation let me sit there and spend the first half hour just breathing, trying to calm myself, and using techniques I learned in therapy to try to return to my baseline. I then took the test one problem at a time, taking short breaks after each problem. As a result of this accommodation, I had a fair shot at PTSD not affecting my performance.

4. Use of the Testing Center. My university maintained a testing center for students who received disability accommodations. The staff there were fully cognizant on each student’s accommodations. When I arrived, a testing station (with a chair that would not place my back to the door and provided a clear view of a clock) was ready for me. The staff would also connect with me and we’d plan my breaks, if I intended to use them, and anything else I may need to access my accommodations at that time. This was more for the professors than the students, freeing them from having to directly provide the accommodations themselves, but it was a good situation to take tests in and I often used it. This accommodation was more a matter of convenience for me and my professors than anything else, but it also ensured I never had to spend time and energy advocating for my accommodations; they were in place by default.

What It Looks Like In Real Life: Working

In my first grown-up job, I got disability accommodations.

I had many client meetings throughout the week, so I discussed with my first boss what time of the week was least likely to interfere with a client meeting. This turned out to be late Friday afternoon. So I moved my therapy appointment to Fridays, and my first accommodation was shifting my schedule. On Fridays, I either started early or worked through lunch, and left early for that.

I was able to get my hearing aids to connect to my work computer without any help from the company, as my hearing aids are manufactured by a company that specializes in app integration and control. But they let me know that if I needed them to buy or do anything — there are special transmitters and software to help with this process, which are needed for some hearing aids — that they would do so.

And once they changed my duties such that I was responsible for teaching basic, high-school level statistics to a group of people with thick Southeast Asian regional accents, all of whom were hired to do data analysis despite not knowing what a correlation is or means, but simply because $20,000 is a full-time professional salary there and so four innumerate foreigners can be put on a team instead of one STEM-degree-holding American, not to put too fine a resentful point on it, I needed my schedule changed again.

I could do that work, obviously, as I am an experienced mathematics tutor—but it was exhausting.

Have you ever played “Where’s Waldo?”

It’s a series of books with very intense, detail-filled, busy drawings and there’s a tiny little picture of Waldo in each of them. They can be a fun way to keep kids busy, looking for Waldo. But if an adult does it for very long, his or her eyes can be utterly exhausted by the time Waldo is located on every page.

When I was done teaching those classes, having people whose accents were excruciatingly difficult for me to understand ask me questions—to say nothing of the frustration and disgust of the fact that I was in the position of trying to teach data analysts the difference between mean and median—the intense effort of using my disabled ears made my head and my whole body feel the way your eyes would feel if you went through the entire Waldo oeuvre.

So we re-arranged some things such that these classes were towards the end of my day, when I could be done for the day once I was done.

Those were all reasonable accommodations for my disability. Likewise, I am aware of a coworker at that job with low vision, for whom the company bought a special, extra-large monitor, and another coworker with some kind of orthopedic issue in his spine, for whom they bought a special chair.

All reasonable, all ways to keep an employee working productively.

So far I don’t need any in my new job, because I have both more autonomy and much more important work to do than teaching remedial math to foreigners who were hired because they’re cheap labor.

But if something comes up where I need them, I will ask for them. That would likely mean special captioning software, if I was in a meeting with a lot of people and the auto-captions on Teams weren’t sufficient, or someone else being assigned to take good notes for me and send them to me after the meeting.

I have excellent hearing aids already, and am in fact still using the last pair the taxpayers bought for me, just before I started my grown-up job. The next pair, which is probably about a year away—hearing aids reliably last about five years—will be on me, and will cost somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 depending on how much my new insurance pays. (Most insurances pay nothing towards hearing aids; very good insurances pay 20%.)

I am quite spoiled with regard to hearing aid functions. MD Hearing Aid, for which I did some product testing to help the DarkHorse podcast, hosted by Dr. Bret Weinstein and Dr.

Heather Heying

, decide to make them a sponsor, provides the hearing aid equivalent of the reading glasses you can get on the endcap at Walmart.

They’re inexpensive and work surprisingly well, especially in restaurants, and are shockingly good for their price point. But to continue working effectively, I need the app control that lets me link them to various devices and feed sound directly into my ears. Expensive hearing aids are also individually coded to the person’s audiogram results, meaning that my specific hearing loss—the frequencies where I hear little or nothing on my own—are most heavily compensated for.

As the job is remote, I can handle all my own PTSD-related accommodation needs. If I suddenly had to work in an office, that would get complicated, but the company leadership is solid on this. Remote work means you can find the best person, period, not the best person who either lives within thirty minutes of the office or has the kind of life where a cross-country move is an option, which is of course a much, much smaller pool.

The Math Maths Pretty Well

Here’s why the ADA, taxpayer spending on helping disabled people like me go to college, and the accommodations it required my university and my employers to provide, are all good things.

For me, but also for you, if you’re an American taxpayer.

I did the math, to the best of my ability.

Between food stamps and providing what I needed to get through school, which amounted to therapy, an audiologist’s care, and two sets of expensive hearing aids, as well as the four accommodations mentioned above, the taxpayers were required to spend a certain amount of money. I added 10% to what they paid my therapist and audiologist and to the amount of direct aid I was given in food stamps, to cover administration costs. I didn’t add anything for the peer notes, since the university had a pre-existing system to recognize community service, and having no idea how to calculate “my” share of the testing center, I put in $2,000 a year as a guess. I added all this up to get a grand total.

I am in year five of my career, and I had paid that much in taxes by the end of year three.

All the rest of my working life, I will be a net benefit to the economy based on the help I received, and I’m not even counting the fact that I would still be on welfare if I hadn’t finished school, so my drain would be ongoing. And likely much worse, as the poverty of living on welfare is both depressing and anxiety-producing, so those issues would have little or no chance of improvement.

Abuses of the Concept and the Law

Everything has unexpected consequences.

And everything can be abused.

Life is exceedingly complex, particularly in a free country, and everything has trade-offs. People on both sides of the political spectrum have a tendency to think that if only their principles were instituted and codified into law, black and white scenarios would be the norm and all this messy ambiguity would be, if not eliminated, significantly easier to deal with.

They rarely put it that way, but you can tell that’s what a lot of them think.

Yes, I want school choice. Absolutely I do.

But I can admit, as the loudest voices on this topic rarely do, that private schools don’t have to accept everyone, and some kids would consequently fall through the cracks. The market would correct over time, but as the COVID school closures showed us, even a few years of lost time for kids is brutally difficult to recover. It would help many more kids than it would hurt, which is why I support it. But it would absolutely hurt some kids. Some kids would be stuck in already-failing public schools that would have significantly less money all of a sudden, and they would be failed even more dramatically than they already are being failed.

I love the Second Amendment and I want it to stand inviolate.

But I can admit, as the loudest voices on this topic rarely do, that in any individual gun owner’s life, the freedoms afforded to them by the second amendment are far more likely to result in that gun owner, or a member of that gun owner’s family, dying by suicide than protecting that gun owner from government tyranny. That is a cost/benefit calculus that each American must be free to make for himself or herself.

Those examples are meant to stand in for all the other ways that our public discourse is often a fight between two overly simplified notions of how to solve a problem, each of which ignores the predictable trade-offs that their solution would cause, mostly so this essay won’t be ten thousand words long. (In other words, supply your own “not alls” and don’t send me email educating me about your favorite “not all”, please.)

Do people abuse the ADA, sometimes in ridiculous ways?

Yes.

Do public schools, in particular, often reframe discipline issues as disability issues so they can keep disruptive kids in the classroom and keep collecting federal money?

Yes. (Read the Teachers subreddit, if you dare…)

But these dynamics—people abusing a system, and manipulating an incentive structure to suit their own ends—are inescapable parts of human nature.

It’s possible to reform and improve the system where it’s flawed, without discarding the valuable aspects. No system will ever work perfectly, and the need to be vigilant against abuses (forever and ever, without end) is a necessary part of any system that involves humans.

We can change the bathwater where it’s dirty, without throwing out the baby.

The American emphasis on including disabled people in the workforce might be expressed and implemented in ways that are annoying and off-putting, and it’s certainly understandable to feel that way.

But it does a lot of good, too, and the taxpayers are absolutely supporting one less person as a direct result of it.

It’s the first week of October, which is what Congress called, 79 years ago, National Employ The Physically Handicapped Week, and I for one am glad.

I even like that politically incorrect language a little better, to tell the truth.

Happy National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week, y’all!

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