The Short Bus

Have you read Jonathan Mooney’s The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal (New York: Henry Holt, 2008)? If you serve struggling learners, this is probably a book you’ll want to read at some point. Mr. Mooney has, thankfully, become something of a presence in the world of special school populations. His book opens with this excellent epigraph from French philosopher and critic (whom I have, in general, found impenetrable) Michel Foucault that might be worth considering as we prepare for another school year:

“The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normal is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements.”