October is National Disability Employment Month
Click here to listen to this as a podcast . Rachel was diagnosed early on in life with a cognitive memory disability. Essentially, she did not have short-term memory and could not remember what was happening in the moment. Her family and everyone around her knew and tried to support her as best as they could. When she came to my high school English class, one of the projects was to recite a monologue from Romeo and Juliet . Everyone let me know that to accommodate Rachel, I needed to let her simply read a monologue. While my head knew that was probably what needed to happen, I just wondered if Rachel wouldn't rather try to memorize the text? So, I did a very strange thing: I asked her. "Rachel, this next assignment requires that you recite something from memory. Do you want to try and do that?" Rachel looked deeply at me and I could tell she was really pondering what I was asking her to consider. Then, with a look of defiance, she replied, "I want to be able to do t