Site icon Carly Fox Disability Advocacy

Surviving School: How the Education System Failed Me as a Disabled Student, and Why I’m Going Back Anyways

Carly Fox

Albert Einstein allegedly said that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” 

Which is to say, I’m about to write a blog about how much K-12 and university education sucked as a disabled student just a few days before heading off to grad school.

Say what you will, no one is doing it quite like me.

By some miracle, spite, actual effort, or some combination of the three, I graduated from uOttawa summa cum laude (which is latin for big, big nerd) this Spring.

I’ve been told graduation is supposed to be this big celebration of your academic achievement or whatever, but that Spring I just kept telling myself “uOttawa can’t hurt me anymore.”

I’d like to think I was at least half-joking. 

While uOttawa gave me a fairly hard time, it would be unfair to say that my issues, grievances, and general disenfranchisement with the education system started in 2020 as I started my freshman year. 

No, they started 16 years ago on the first day of Grade 1, and they really haven’t let up since. 

I’m writing this blog for a few reasons:

With that being said, let’s get into it.

Grade School: Unwell, Undiagnosed, Unimpressed

My Secret Speech Impediment

Unless you’ve talked to me drunk or in French (or god forbid, both), you probably don’t know I had a speech impediment. 

Compound consonants like CH, TR, and SH (which, as you may know, are in a LOT of words) were a bit of a struggle for me. The CHs and TRs would get caught behind my nose and come out silently in an exhale, and I didn’t quite understand where to start to make my SHs not sound like SSs.

Naturally, this was a gold mine for bullying. They would ask me to say “beach”, and I would be confused why they were laughing in my face.

One of the best parts of growing up undiagnosed neurodivergent is that things like this went completely over my head. 

Luckily, by some geographical miracle, I was at a rich person school. And rich person schools have resources. Before I knew it, I was being whisked away from class to meet with some nice lady to play word games, and without realizing, the speech impediment faded away. 

With the speech impediment taken care of, I was able to generally exist as a normal student for the next few years. Yes, I was frequently thrown a textbook for the grade ahead and told to entertain myself during class. Yes, I was known to be very chatty and had to multitask at all times – but also a privilege to have in class. Yes, I could be a little problematic when I thought a rule was dumb or when I was overwhelmed by others making too much noise or not following rules. 

But, you know, normal student. 

Head Start/False Start on Mental Illness

And then, as it so often does, mental illness kicked in around Grade 5. 

I like to joke that I got a head start on the whole depression and anxiety thing as most people aren’t diagnosed until high school, and I guess that’s true enough. But I also genuinely believe we are dismissing so many mentally ill youth as “going through puberty” in a way that sets them up for failure when they finally do get diagnosed. 

Anyways, my head start with depression, anxiety, and an eating disorder would turn out to be a false start. It turns out, all of my symptoms would be explained 5 years later with the ADHD diagnosis we now all know and love. 

But at that time, I just felt like I had too many problems to have even the slightest clue where to start.

So, I went with the obvious response when you don’t know what to do. Withdraw. I started missing a lot of class, and on days when I did bother to show up, I would often leave around lunch.

By the time I got to high school, my mom gave me access to her attendance app so I could sign myself in and out at will. But before that, I had to go through the secretaries. And they sure made sure I had to go through them.

I will never know what possesses certain kinds of people to work in school administration, but I do know these kinds of people love to berate and belittle children. 

While I was clearly struggling, these secretaries decided to make fun of me to my face when I was at my lowest. I was 11. 

I’ll tell you, it definitely did not encourage me to come back to school.

High School: Diagnoses (Sometimes) Make a Difference

C+ for Effort

By the time grade 9 rolled around, I knew my body wasn’t exactly in peak condition. 

I would blame this on a past eating disorder, a lack of stamina from time spent in bed depressed, continued growing pains, and any other form of mental gymnastics I could think of at the time. 

But all these mental gymnastics simply could not help me with gym class.

My attendance had not improved since grade 5, and wouldn’t for another few years – so I wasn’t exactly shocked to receive a mid-term gym grade of C+. However, my average was going to absolutely tank if the C+ stuck around.

So, I talked to my gym teacher. She said that if she only marked me based on the days I was actually in class, I would have an A. 

On the days I managed to show up, I gave a great effort.

On the days I struggled through undiagnosed pain and mental illnesses to show up to school and get side comments on how I’m actually at gym today, I grit my teeth, pushed through the pain I couldn’t yet understand, and gave a class I cared nothing about everything I had. 

And that was worth a C+.

While I did a written assignment and pulled an end-of-term B+, that moment sticks with me. 

The teacher didn’t understand what I was going through, I didn’t understand what I was going through, but most importantly, the outdated graded attendance system didn’t care what I was going through. And it never will.

Oh, the Drama

Grade 11 Drama Class (taken in Grade 10 because my timetable was a nightmare) was a similar attendance-based issue. And let’s be fair, missing rehearsal without explanation did not exactly endear me to the teacher or my group members.

However, there’s a very clear line between consequences for your actions and teacher-sponsored bullying. 

Now, this teacher was equally famous and infamous. Get on her good side, and you’re set. Get on her bad side, you might as well drop the class and then drop dead. In that order. 

Things were looking particularly irredeemable for me until word got to this teacher that I had acquired a bright and shiny new diagnosis that suddenly made me tortured, interesting, and ultimately worthy of being a true artist: Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis.

Oh yes, with this revered title my absences had instantly become their own performances. My knee brace became a strategically placed costume. My now perfectly understood pain worth inexhaustible sympathy became the object of the perfect character study.

What a complete and utter switch-up from the woman who encouraged other students to gang up on me. 

I tolerated her the same way I tolerate plenty of people now. Focus on the good intentions, painfully smile at their pity, then metaphorically bash my head against the wall the second they turn their backs. 

You can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.

You can explain your disability, but you can’t make them see you as equal. 

There Was This Dog in Math Class

Sometimes when people ask me how I got diagnosed with ADHD and I’m not in the mood for some nuanced or wise or enlightening or earth-shaking revelation about being diagnosed as a woman, I just say “there was this dog in math class.” Which isn’t entirely not true.

While there had been some exceptionally clear signs of ADHD from a young age, schools really do not care until your grades are dropping or you’re disrupting class.

And I had already tried disrupting class – they just thought it was funny!

So, it was time for the second approach. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was only good at school because it suited the way my brain functioned, and my brain only functioned that way because of the ADHD being socialized in a traditionally feminine way (aka do not create problems, figure it out yourself, never complain.)

This whole façade quickly dropped once Grade 10 math got to parabolas. (Which I have yet to use in real life.)

Now, I had study skills. I had perseverance. I was (I think) pretty smart. 

But there was something about that god damn parabola that altered my brain forever. Or better yet, how I perceived my own brain. 

My perfect little brain that went a thousand miles a minute and spit out any answer I wanted (more because of pattern recognition than actual intelligence) had become this evil malfunctioning machine that could not shortcut its way through understanding parabolas.

I hit a wall. A curved wall. Plotted on an x and y axis.

Now that my brain wasn’t being constantly fed easy content for analysis, it refused to focus on anything. Anything except a brown labrador that walked the block every day around 10am. 

You really can’t blame me for focusing on the dog. Without it, I was now conscious of the viciously loud and constant noise of my own brain that had finally met its match. 

I genuinely felt like I had officially gone crazy. That I was losing all my intelligence, and that all my future plans had gone up in smoke. 

(Can you believe the last section was about drama?)

Naturally, I refused to accept any responsibility for myself and went straight to the doctor. Surely, if my brain was broken, it could be fixed.

To her credit, my family doctor was way ahead of the curve on destigmatizing ADHD. I walked in, said I was having issues paying attention, and absolutely aced the test she gave me.

Apparently, you are not supposed to ace that test.

I went straight on the same meds I’m still on today, which without counselling or awareness was effectively like throwing gas on a fire. 

With more mental energy and focus, I was terrifying. Quick with a comeback, no tolerance for distractions, and deeply irritable when the outside world somehow drowned out my inside world. 

I’d love to pretend I figured out this whole concerta-sponsored irritability nightmare fuel pretty quickly, but it took until the COVID lockdowns for me to make peace with my own mind. 

But we aren’t quite there yet.

That One Time They Tried to Kick Me Out of High School

Even with the diagnoses, my attendance had not picked up.

This sounds deeply counter-intuitive, unless you’re familiar with the drugs used to treat arthritis. Microdosed chemotherapy, steroids, biologics that change the composition of your immune cells. 

One day I’ll rank all the drugs I’ve done for one of our more fun blogs.

By the time Grade 11 came around, I was struggling. The meds made me incredibly nauseous and constantly fatigued, to the point where I felt more zombie than human.

Apparently zombies are still under the jurisdiction of the school’s attendance officer.

Despite somehow still being a straight A student at this time (largely due to my teachers going above and beyond to email me assignments, shout out Doc Wat), the Vice Principal called my mom and myself in for a meeting.

Having absolutely no clue what was about to happen, I walked in with an open mind. To me, the attendance officer was just there to scare us into going to school – like an academic boogeyman. They didn’t have any real power.

Apparently they did. Again, despite being a straight A student, I was explicitly told I could no longer remain in mainstream schooling.

Oh yeah. A straight A student was getting kicked out of high school.

Luckily, I had no clue what was going on. And when this happens, I ask what the options are. 

In what would become a signature move, I quickly confused everyone in the room enough until I had exactly what I wanted: a customized Frankenstein education plan that would allow me to attend one morning class three times a week (conveniently coinciding with band practice, which I was holding on to for dear life), and meet with an itinerant teacher once a week at the public library.

I even managed to schedule the itinerant meeting right after the therapy dog session at our central branch. 

While I thought it was going to be completely embarrassing to be known as a semi-drop out at school, it turns out no one even noticed my Frankenstein’s monster of an education. People saw me at band practice and in the halls first thing in the morning, and just assumed I was in different classes.

I was getting away with murder.

And, thanks to Itinerant education, I was able to finally apply myself to the self-taught lesson packets and fly through courses way faster than I had any right to – ultimately freeing up additional spares for my final year of high school, which I planned on attending full-time.

Magnum Opus

By some miracle, things were actually looking up my senior year of high school. We had 20/20 vision we would joke, as the upcoming 2020 seemed so clear…

I had speed ran countless arthritis treatments until finding a manageable balance of methotrexate (microdosed chemo) and Enbrel (a biologic that apparently has me banned from donating blood the rest of my life.) My ADHD meds were working. I was somehow, slowly, starting to feel better.

Was my attendance the first semester perfect? Absolutely not! This was still me we’re talking about. But it was better – and everyone noticed.

At this time, I was also taking the Grade 12 Creative Writing course. While I had enjoyed English classes way more than my peers, I had never really considered myself much of a writer. I really only took it because I needed a credit, it fit my schedule, and everyone’s favourite teacher taught the course.

Somehow, I actually started to like creative writing. With an ADHD brain that was becoming less nightmarish by the day, and that teacher openly sharing his own experience with ADHD, it became almost fun to apply my “new” brain to creative challenges. 

Parabolas still weren’t my thing though.

The biggest creative challenge I faced was developing my own end-of-year independent project, which he called a Magnum Opus. While I initially rolled my eyes at the assignment and pretended not to care, something genuinely awakened inside of me.

My end-of-year project (which I still will not refer to as a Magnum Opus) was a poetry book called Body Betrayal – which paired poems on ADHD and arthritis with pantone colour swatches and a custom Spotify playlist.

Writing it was cathartic, and reflective, and challenging, and enriching, and allowed me to finally put years of silent struggle into words for the very first time. 

And as you can tell, once I started to put my experience with disability into words I have never really been able to stop.

The Best Semester Ever and Nothing Will Go Wrong, Obviously

Now, the first half of Grade 12 was my best academic performance yet. But that was before I was finally old enough to receive treatment for my fibromyalgia.

The difference was instant and obvious. I had my brain back. I had my body back. I had my life back.

I went to school. First one day at a time, then a whole week. 

While the other kids had stopped making fun of my attendance when they found out about the whole arthritis thing, they had now taken to cheering me on. 

Then another week went by.

Still there.

Another.

I made it 40 days. 

40 whole days without a single absence. An unimaginably low bar for some, and an unimaginably high bar for me. 

Everyone wanted me in a group project, now that they knew I would show.

While my band director was initially apprehensive about me becoming section leader given my past absences, he went on to select competition pieces based around my section who were improving by the day. 

And to think, just a year ago, they tried to kick me out of school.

And then – you know what’s next – we were about to have the longest March break in history. Three weeks of vacation, with no homework or tests or makeup classes!

March break ended up being a lot longer than three weeks…

University

I’ll keep this section short, since a lot of it has been documented already and I don’t want to beat the dead horse.

(Horse, GG, uOttawa? Give me some credit here folks.)

Also, like most of my blogs, this is getting pretty long.

Despite the pandemic, I moved to Ottawa in September 2020 to begin the first year of my undergraduate program in International Development, assuming class would be moved in-person in a few months and I would not have to brave an upended housing market at full demand.

While online school lasted longer than anyone imagined, it turned out to be the perfect set-up for me, personally speaking. 

Chasing the interrupted academic high of the second semester of Grade Twelve, I was able to completely throw myself into my studies – without wasting time and energy on things like commuting and meal prepping. 

I quickly learned that if I turn my camera off during Zoom lectures, I would quickly do anything but pay attention. So, I became the one person in every lecture with her camera on. Worse, I nodded to signal I was paying attention and to inconspicuously stim.

By my fifth year, I was still known as the girl who had her camera on.

Around halfway through second year, uOttawa began transitioning to hybrid courses – allowing students to choose between attending online or in-person.

Thriving under online classes but aware I was probably missing key psychological milestones, I was able to gently ease myself into the demanding lifestyle of university education and began to enjoy in-person classes.

That was, until there were only in-person classes.

Despite spending thousands of dollars on equipment and training staff on how to use hybrid equipment, it feels as though post-secondary education as a whole continues to have a hybrid amnesia. 

I have documented the betrayal, and the rage, and the frustration I felt at this time. And I am very comfortable not revisiting it.

But one thing I haven’t explicitly visited is the disconnect I felt between reality and academia. 

Despite studying international development (improving health, education, and employment outcomes for the most marginalized) and conflict (the most mass-disabling man-made event to date) – neither program adequately acknowledged disability, let alone meaningfully incorporated it.

While I was very lucky to have peers and profs encourage me to incorporate disability in assignments, class discussions, and group projects – I felt incredibly disenfranchised and disillusioned. 

How could I possibly care about these studies that don’t care about me? 

How can I consider this education worthwhile when there are such glaring knowledge gaps?

To make matters worse, I was working my dream job with the National Educational Association of Disabled Students. My day job was disability, my personal life was disability, I was disabled. 

There was no escaping disability, unless you looked in any course syllabus.

Despite this, I convinced myself that a solid academic background in international development and human rights would help my career in disability. And it already has. But the whole time, I had to push through this overwhelming feeling that this program, this field, this career path I had my heart set on was just not meant for me. Not meant for people like me.

Reader, this is obviously melodramatic bullshit dredged up from some of my lower moments. This field is very much so for people like me, and everyone is about to get real disabled from conflict or climate change or communicable diseases anyways. Basically, I’m way ahead of the curve.

But that doesn’t erase how abandoned I felt. So, I lashed out the way any rational person would: I got way too into my job.

Professors, if you are reading this, I am so sorry. None of this was personal. But I was pretty much working non-stop during every lecture. 

Was I paying attention? Yeah! 

Was I taking notes? Absolutely! 

Were many other students distracted because I was putting together a marketing plan or instagram advertisement on my laptop? Definitely.

This heavy dependence on multitasking to juggle a technically impossible workload would later result in burnout so bad I had to quit my job, but I’m gonna save that topic for a later date.

At this point, if you’re still reading because wow this is getting long, you might be asking “how was your attendance?” 

To which I would answer, “bad, but for new reasons!”

In what can only be described as perfect irony, I was missing a lot of class to go to other universities and talk to disabled students about their experiences as part of my work for NEADS. And I mean a LOT of class.

I also got struck down by a fun new mystery disease in my final year, which turned out to be Hashimoto’s – an autoimmune thyroid disorder. Turns out autoimmune disorders are not like chicken pox…

Between this and an absolutely shot immune system from years of immunosuppressants, a particularly bad case of flu led me to miss 30% of classes – or $900 in tuition. 

I feel sick writing that.

Of course, graded attendance was coming back to bite me in the ass too. As if nearly $1k in educational losses wasn’t enough. 

Half of my classes that final semester had graded attendance, and I had a nerdy average to maintain. To this day, I have no clue how I pulled it off. Desperation, Dayquil, spite? 

My thoughts and feelings on graded attendance remain the same, so I’ll just leave you with this conversation:

Prof: “You were an excellent student. I just wish you were at more classes, you always had something to contribute.”

Me: “[Prof], I wish I was at more classes too.”

Grad School: The Definition of Insanity

Returning to the alleged Einstein quote (which turns out is very contentious but there’s no way I’m changing the intro now), you’re probably baffled as to why I can write all of this about the state of education and all the many ways in which it has failed me – just to go to grad school in a few days.

How I can come back from that gym class C+, or missing 30% of my final term of undergrad.

How I can dive right back into an academia which ignores, excludes, and exploits disability.

Because those moments and others’ (in)actions don’t define me. 

Because I genuinely love nerding out about economics, and governance, and human rights, and yes, disability. 

Because I found a program that lets me finally embed accessibility and disability into my studies. With actual courses, not just DIY leg work.

Because I get to attend the most disabled university in Canada, if not the world. 

And because education is supposed to be for everyone.

This Fall, I’ll be attending Carleton University for a Masters of Arts in Political Economy, with a specialization in Accessibility. 

I’ll take classes on social policy, and universal design, and the politics of health care, and lots of other nerdy stuff!

I’ll TA classes on international development, and maybe be the representation I never had. 

And for the first time in 8 years, I’m going to put school first. 

I have effectively put my career in the disability non-profit sector on hold to either be the definition of insanity or to challenge it.

Which is terrifying, and nerve-wracking, and exhilarating.

And I can’t wait. 

Exit mobile version