By Gary Oey Steven

• While I have read one essay and one poem throughout the first couple days of Composition II class, I became very passionate in identifying social justice issues which has to do with stereotypes based on certain people. When I read and discussed stereotypes in class based on race and appearence, I felt touched as someone who constantly gets stereotyped by neurotypical people and faculty based on ability and cognitive appearence. It is frustrating when people with privilege — especially neurotypical people — are only trained to read minds, appearences, and judge someone based on race, ability, or other types of vulnerabilities without getting to know who they are. This can lead to misconceptions about other people, segregating and discriminatory treatments of others whether unintentionally or intentionally, and not solving the problem but rather traumatizing the person being misread.
• In my Ethnographics class, learning about how unfair the grading system works in college has gotten be very passionate and upset about how the majority of society is degree-normative, when students need to maintain certain GPAs in order to enroll in internships, scholarships, mentorship programs, student leadership programs, and also be able to stay on campus. For students with disabilities, mental health challenges, financial challenges, or other struggles creating barriers to them succeeding, success which only relies on degrees and certain GPAs in order to earn privilege is not helping them maintain competence, but only puts certain students in a box. This especially applies to students currently in college who used to be in District 75 back in high school and have to spend their entire life being segregated by regular faculty members — resulting in them being clueless on how to become more independent in college leading to work burnout from specialized faculty members and paraprofessionals when they are not being supported by regular faculty members.
• From what I have learned in both Composition II and Ethnographics class, not only am I expressing what is societally wrong in these classes. I have taken system-wide action by actually including what I have learned in a letter to the President of Guttman. I truly believe that issues like this should be addressed and reformed as more students come together, advocate, and build a campus-wide system which would accept diverse learning abilities — without having to make students fear for their grades lowering down if they either failed in an exam due to memory issues or a project due to implicit neuro-normative norms which either limit students’ creativity or do not make their directions clear enough.