This article is a continuation of a previous post about Friendship Tips for Visually Impaired Students in Inclusive Schools. For visually impaired students attending inclusive schools, you might have experienced situations like the following.
Usually, in certain subjects, such as drawing, visually impaired students are given alternative tasks, like singing or playing music. Another example: in Geography class, teachers often assign drawing maps. Visually impaired students are typically asked to find these maps online instead. Why is this? Of course, drawing is a quite difficult task for visually impaired individuals.
Now, when visually impaired students are given alternative assignments, you'll often hear remarks like these from other students: “Why do you have it so easy? Your task is super simple.” Or “Why are your tasks different?” Or “I wish I could get a task like yours. I can't draw either.” Or similar sentiments. When addressing incidents like the illustration above, we can view them from two different perspectives.
From the perspective of visually impaired students, you should not feel proud of receiving lighter tasks compared to your peers. You receive this leniency because the teacher/instructor understands what you can and cannot do. Therefore, whether a task is easy or difficult depends on your ability and willingness to complete it. Meanwhile, from the perspective of non-visually impaired students, you should not feel envious of the lighter tasks given by the teacher/instructor to your visually impaired classmates.
As explained above, this task leniency is granted due to the student's own abilities. For instance, visually impaired students are not assigned drawing tasks because it would, of course, be very difficult for them to create an image, given their very limited visual imagination (hopefully, in the future, there will be a tool that makes it easier for visually impaired individuals to perform visual tasks like drawing).
If you feel envious of these lighter tasks, it's akin to not appreciating the “physical perfection” you possess. In other words, if you desire the same tasks given to visually impaired students, it means you are essentially wishing for the same condition experienced by those visually impaired individuals. From the explanation above, the author simply wants to convey one important point: that truly, everything we receive (tasks, exams, mandates, etc.) will never exceed our capabilities.
Be grateful for all that we have.