Some things we take for granted. Take education: many of us kids wish and dream for snow days, or extra p.a. days so that we don't have to go to school. Education in Ontario is a guarantee with educational opportunities available free of charge to all kids living in the province up until high-school graduation. Courses are offered at various levels from basic to advanced and gifted depending upon the student's goals: the workforce, college or university. Although we don't often appreciate the homework that comes with school, it's school that opens the door to the future.
For me, the system is broken. I am one of those kids stuck in a limbo between being too sick to attend school with any sort of regularity, but not sick enough to be admitted to the hospital and entered into their hospital-based school. I attempted to get back to attending highschool this year; it was an epic failure that resulted in being hospitalized for almost 2 months and developing intestinal failure as a result of contracting a simple bug. You see, I take immuno-suppressants to combat my Crohn's Disease. This means that any little thing that comes along, I tend to catch it and it tends to develop into something nasty like pneumonia. Preventing this is not as simple as "wash your hands", which does help, but in a school of thousands, when there is a viral outbreak, there is often no real escape.
As a result of developing the pneumonia and intestinal failure this past year, I was unable to complete the two credits I was working towards. Even though I had 90% in grade 9 gifted science, I lost the credit. It was both devastating and angering. I had put so much work and energy into keeping up, and ended up with nothing to show for it. This caused me to really sit down and think about my options.
To be realistic, I am not going to get much better. I have refractory Crohn's Disease, which is a fancy way of saying "nothing works". In 6 years, I haven't had one single period of remission. My current treatment has helped, but it hasn't been the complete answer to put me into remission. I have run out of available treatment options, so now we're on to symptom management. I will likely always have some degree of immune suppression due to my auto-immune illnesses. So in being realistic, I have to look at the past history when I am trying to plan for what might work for my future. And attending a regular highschool doesn't seem to work well for me. I don't want to keep putting in massive amounts of work only to lose it all because I contracted some simple bug. There had to be another solution.
The only other education option available free of charge to me is through the Student Alternative Learning Program. The only courses available however are at a basic learning level. I went from being at the top of my class in the competitive gifted program to doing basic level work. Everyone keeps telling me how "lucky" I am that I get easier work, that I should be able to just fly through it. For me, it is anything but easy. The only way that I can describe the work I am being given is mind-numbingly boring, and even that doesn't quite get at the real feeling.
When I was in grade 1, I refused to do work. Once we initially learned how to do something, I wanted to move on, I didn't feel the need to practice something that came as natural to me as breathing. So I would sit there and cause problems. My mom was encouraged to send me for psycho-educational testing which revealed that I was highly gifted in my analytic and reasoning skills, and my abstract thinking was off the charts. I was also diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. Unfortunately, educational options for children who learn similarly to me, didn't start until grade 4. By then I was too sick for school most of the time, but still being given gifted level material to work on.
And then we have this work. Just to give you an example: I learned how to do a bar graph in kindergarten when we all chose our favourite ice cream flavour and we would chart out the numbers. In my grade 9 work, it described to us step-by-painful-step exactly what we needed to do. It felt condescending. It brought tears to my eyes to have gone from work that was much more demanding to this. The work is also full of spelling errors and outdated information, but that's so low on the list of priorities that need to be changed.
I understand that the system isn't designed for kids like me, and that kids like me are unique and don't come along each day. But we are out there. I also understand that they need to make sure that they have resources available for kids who don't learn concepts as easily, so they have to be able to cover most of the population regardless of ability. Yet to have NO options available that would allow us to get to university without being forced to seek education elsewhere? That just doesn't seem right to me.
I sincerely hope that this can change. This needs to change. We all deserve the opportunity to fulfill our dreams, regardless of our state of health. Yet we can only get there if there are programs in place to allow us to successfully get there. Only when the opportunities and supports are there can education truly be available for us all.
