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Teacher, I'm not Retarded

Name: Gary Roberts
Email: jg86@hotmail.com
Date: 13 Jul 2001
Time: 02:14:03

Story

My first job was as a teacher at a state hospital for the mentally retarded. It was a part time job but one that gave me an orientation to a different world. This was a huge facility in the days before the concept of least restrictive environment came into play. There was a movement to look closely at the institutionalized population with the idea that many may have been placed there inappropriately.

There was a sizable population of deaf or hearing impaired in the institution. The decision was made to isolate the deaf population and try to work with them as a group. This was where my involvement began as I was placed in the academic program to work with a class of young residents who were deaf. These people were shifted into a dorm together and socialization and peer identify was encouraged.

As I began to work with the group and use American Sign Language as the primary communication tool, it was exciting to watch as many of them for the first time in a long while began to communicate. Several were organically brain damaged and clinically retarded, but most of them were kids who had behavior or emotional problems as their secondary disability. In today's environment, they would not have been a problem to contain in the school system, but in those days they did not fit into the residential environments offered to the deaf. Their behavior problems led to their suffering education lag, and after being evaluated by psychologists, they were classified as mentally retarded. In the late 60s, many parents, when confronted by a deaf child who was also was acting out, agreed to institutional placement.

Many of the young men and women gravitated around me in the class room. They had various levels of communication skills, and I watched their ability to communicate evolve and expand daily. One boy in particular impressed me initially as being the more profoundly limited by cognitive ability. Still, I worked with him tirelessly and brought friends into the class room to work one on one with the students. Slowly the students evolved, and several were moved out into the community and returned to the state school for the deaf.

The problem with the boy I mentioned continued, and progress was not evident. The time was growing near when my involvement would end as I prepared to move to another state. I pushed myself to increase my level of involvement and worked out different strategies to try to get results with the students I was working with. The most rewarding day of my tenure at the institution was the day this boy turned to me and signed expressively and fluently, "Teacher, I am not Retarded."

In the weeks I had remaining, we raced ahead and retested the young man and discovered a superior intelligence. He had learned to mimic the people around him as a way to focus attention away from himself. He had learned that deafness would lead to his being victimized both physically and sexually by other residents. As a low functioning mentally retarded person, he had learned that he would be left alone and the charade made him safer in the institutional environment he was in.

I followed the young man along after I left the job and moved away. The last contact I had with him was when he was enrolled at Gallaudet University as a prep student. He had re-entered the school system and progressed through the same system which had dropped him earlier and classified him as unteachable. His charade had been the mask of mental retardation, which obscured a superior intelligence and marked potential. Today, with improved awareness of disabilities and specific skills of psychologist in assessing disabilities, we hope that similar mistakes don't get made.

It was personally rewarding to me that I was allowed to be there and witness the unmasking of this young man. We must remain vigilant so that events such as I have described do not re-occur.

Copyright © 2001 Gary Roberts. All rights reserved.

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