this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Sounds like a disability act lawsuit waiting to happen tbh. Some of us have very poor fine motor skills or worse and would be severely disadvantaged by having to do even short hand written assignments..
If someone actually had a disability, they wouldn't have to do it or would be given other accommodations. That's basically how it was for thousands of years before people had word processors.
Lemmy accidentally deleted my comment right before I was going to post it, I had to rewrite it.
I've fought for years to get accommodations that I was legally obligated to, (504 Plan) fought with a school, (they were actively refusing to give accommodations, illegally) for 3 years, before giving up and switching schools.
The next couple of schools I tried were not well equipped to provide accommodations, albeit not malicious, (in one case not telling anyone until two months in)
Even after I finally got what I was legally owed, I still had to put up with often writing assignments by hand, (I have fine motor coordination disorder, as the commenter above mentioned), including an entire test. (One of the end of year ones for my sophomore year)
I also have CAPD, which allowed me to skip taking Spanish class, after two years of fighting for it. (I failed the first year of Spanish for obvious reasons, I had to retake it the next year.) (This was at the first school, I don't know why I was able to get this accommodation but not the others, I was in middle school)
Yeah, except many schools don't have the tools to properly do such accommodation, meaning that the students with disabilities are inevitably left behind.
Especially the ones like me with hard to detect disabilities such as ADHD who would have to fight tooth and nail to get their disability acknowledged in the first place and then to convince them of the fact that ADHD, while being mainly mental, DOES significantly impair fine motor skills used for hand writing.
Germany traditionally is quite shocking in their practice of segregating children with disabilities into special Förderschulen. Whereas the U.S. has the Individual’s with Disabilities Education Act since the 1970s, Germany was basically forced into integration recently after the country signed the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2009. And even then, they are taking their sweet time to integrate. See e.g. https://www.aktion-mensch.de/inklusion/bildung/hintergrund/zahlen-daten-und-fakten/inklusionsquoten-in-deutschland as how currently, slightly less than half of German students with disabilities go to a regular school (the Inklusionsanteil).
They would almost certainly make accommodations. I saw many such examples throughout my years of schooling.
What the actual ...
Fun fact, fine motor skills are taught differently in different countries. In some countries, children spend a considerable time improving their writing skills and even the less gifted reach a reasonable level. Of course, I am not talking about children with central nervous system or physical disabilities.
Also, spending so much time on fine motor skills reduces their ability to work in other, somewhat more relevant skills.
I'm not talking about students who haven't done their cursive exercises, I'm talking about students with disabilities making hand writing inherently much more difficult than for other students, especially the ones who'd have to fight tooth and nail to prove it because their handicap is generally thought to be "only mental" in spite of being more complex, like ADHD.