Teaching with differing abilities

It's been two years since I have used this space to record my thoughts or to set myself any kind of schedule for writing. Like many people, a great deal of cognitive space has been devoted to our political landscape. You may have seen the piece about post-election PTSD among students. While I know that I've felt a great deal of despair and expended a great deal of energy as I've watched our civil institutions decay, I resist using PTSD--a medical diagnosis we should reserve to characterize disability brought on by trauma--to describe how I'm feeling.

But as a college instructor, I'm aware of the ways that I need to structure my classes and my instruction to accommodate my students differing abilities. While fifteen years ago, I had more students with hearing or vision impairments that affected my delivery of instruction, today I'm encountering students who have attentional and executive function differences, sometimes brought on by persistent--and often under-treated--mental illness, particularly anxiety. Of course, the inverse question also troubles me: where have the students with hearing and vision loss gone? Why are we not seeing them in the English major?

As someone who has battled most of my life with generalized anxiety disorder and resulting depression, I contemplate how to make my struggles of use to my students. In private conversations, I've shared the short version with students who struggle, mainly so that I can convince them to seek care and to help remove the stigma against mental illness. I don't know, however, how to bring insights from my own struggle into explicit  consideration in the classroom. In the coming days, I'm going to be thinking about this, largely because I am considering John Donne's struggle with depression in his poetry and prose.