Specific Incident: Speech as a Class

There was a time in my life during elementary school where I had to take a SPEECH class. What is speech? It’s a class where you learn how to write, read and speak the English language. Now to some this might not seem as bad as it sounds, to them they actually think it’s helpful. The real problem comes in when you start to see the times where I had to go to take speech class, one during Math class and the other during music class. 

Now how does this relate to the prompt, well since I had to take it during normal class time, I got to skip those classes. Which means I would fall behind when it comes to learning in those subjects. This made me feel different and uncomfortable. Every day for 2 classes, for an hour they would pull me out to come with them. Some students would even start whispering rumors about where I go. To me, it felt like I was being treated for problems that needed to be fixed and that it was making it difficult for me to comprehend. But in reality, we all learn at a different pace, and disrupting that can really take a toll in the future. To make it even worse I had to wait in a room with toys to entertain me until the teacher arrived. While the other kids got to learn and do what normal kids do, I got to play games like fishing and building blocks. This made me feel dumb and empty inside, it always made me wonder if they were there to help or hurt me. It almost made me think that they were doing it on purpose to hurt my education because sometimes it would carry on for another hour. Later on, I would find out that I had no problems communicating with other students during class time, In fact, I thought I was able to understand just as well as they could. 

I remember that even my mother tried to do something about it, she would go every year to tell the speech teacher if it was necessary and she would always respond with the same thing “YES!” They even tried offering a speech class again for middle school, but by that point, my mother had enough.