207: Special Ed
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Edward was just a little boy when he was switched from regular classes to special ed. It was kindergarten. And he viewed the move as a big step up. I thought it was cool because when you think of the word special, meaning like special, you know like good, a good thing. Yeah. And like with my name being Edward, I thought it was kind of built for me. Like Ed meant you. Yeah. He was Ed. Of course he was going to special ed. And he didn't really figure out what special ed classes really meant for years until one day in junior high school writing the school bus. And like one of my friends who is like young in me and in the bus asked me to help him with his homework. And I noticed he had harder homework than we did. Why would you remember about his homework? He was doing like, I think it was timetables and division type things. And ours was like addition and subtraction still. And we were a couple of grades higher than he was. And the spelling words were like they look like high schoolers who would have a spelling word kind of thing like forbidden and probably some more words harder than that. Yeah. Time now. Like the word forbidden. Uh huh. And what were you guys doing? Cow. Sheep. Sleep. It kind of, it kind of got me mad. And I just thought my, I just kind of thought we were all like regular. And then that day I saw the kind of like a divider kind of thing. I would think that that would be very hard. Well, yeah. Because you kind of think of yourself as like regular until like these teachers and people of higher authority are telling you you're not the same as everybody else. So you have to like figure out, okay, so why am I different? A lot of kids in junior high school and high school feel different. But to be told, no, it's not your imagination. You are different. This moment is something a lot of kids and special ed get to at some point or another. A shocking moment of understanding that they are not the same as other kids. And that everybody else knew that long ago they knew it when they didn't. They were doing a project in first grade. Putting snowman actually, where you had to put like cut out objects, like cut out circles and put it on there and put stuff on it. Hallie is a high school student in Chicago. She's 18. And I was doing that and I didn't, I didn't cut well and I accidentally unscrewed the
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