Agoura seventh-graders learn what life is like with physical challenges
Seventh-graders in Agoura Hills learned last week what it's like to experience the challenges others may wrestle with daily because of physical disabilities.
The Ability Awareness Fair at Lindero Canyon Middle School was designed to promote understanding and empathy. Principal Eric Anhalt, who began his career as a special education teacher at Lindero years ago, said the school plans to run this event every other year so each student can participate in the experience before they move on to high school.
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Why is this important?
“So they can understand that every student’s experience is a little different and to include everybody regardless of any challenges they may be facing,” Anhalt explained.
During the 48-minute period, about 50 students visited five stations — mobility, communication, fine motor, reasoning and vision — after special education department head Evie Klein provided a short introduction.
In addition to telling the students what to expect, she showed them photos of well-known people who have had challenges and succeeded, including Albert Einstein, Whoopi Goldberg and Steven Spielberg, all of whom worked through dyslexia; Cameron Diaz, Howie Mandel and Justin Timberlake, who deal with obsessive-compulsive disorder; and Bruce Willis and James Earl Jones, who stuttered.
Andy Bouman, a history special education teacher at the school, said the mobility station was designed to simulate what someone with a physical disability would go through on a daily basis.
While working with wheelchairs and crutches, students learned the difficulty of trying to pick up simple objects.
“It’s hard to steer,” Andy Johnson, 13, said as he maneuvered a wheelchair. “After a while, I got used to it. I think everyone should be respectful towards people who are in wheelchairs.”
He had more trouble with crutches.
“It was hard to carry multiple things while on the crutches because your hands were already occupied,” he said.
Quinn Heffernan, 13, said turning a wheelchair wasn't easy.
“It makes me realize how hard it is for people who are actually in wheelchairs,” Quinn said.
At the communication station, students tried to read aloud with marshmallows in their mouths.
Brianne Bribiesca, the special education math teacher running the station, asked what it felt like.
“It sounded almost muffled, and it was really difficult to talk with something that large in your mouth,” said 13-year-old Kelise Farmer.
“How would it feel if you were to talk like that?" Bribiesca asked. "Would it be frustrating?”
“It would be frustrating because you would be trying to explain something thoroughly, but you can’t because it’s like you have something in your mouth,” said 13-year-old Levi Guillen.
At the reasoning station, Levi commented on the dyslexia exercise.
“It’s really difficult. It looks like the words are moving in a different direction and you don’t even know it,” Levi said. “When the words are scrambled, it’s really confusing and hard.”
Evan Sanchez, 13, said it's easy to take things for granted and added that he felt grateful for the event.
He found a challenge at the fine motor station, where he had to put socks on his hands and thread Froot Loops through a pipe cleaner.
“I never thought about that before,” he said.
Over at the vision station, James Hession, the science special education teacher, explained that some of the exercises show the accommodations some vision-challenged students receive at school.
“They’re not receiving anything different, but the paper may be enlarged or a different color or less blurry, just to help them,” Hession said.
Beverly Brutzkus a volunteer with the Guide Dogs For the Blind, brought Dabble, a 5-month-old Golden Retriever-Labrador that's in training.
“When she’s 2, she’ll be ready to be matched up with a person,” Brutzkus said. “We have them until they’re about 18 months.”
Twelve-year-old Yuval Shillni said the vision station was the most interesting to him. One exercise was putting on dark glasses and reaching into a bag of items and having to identify them.
“It seemed really hard not to be able to see anything — having to figure out what things were without being able to see them,” Yuval said, adding that he learned a lot during the awareness fair. “I learned not to underestimate how hard it is for people to do things we do every day."