On Poverty and Remote Learning

What COVID can teach us about disability, poverty, accessibility, and potential

The COVID-19 pandemic hit me hard in a number of ways, but the most devastating toll was an emotional one. As a chronically ill patient whose pre-existing conditions include an incurable brain disease, stage 2 hypertension, and enough other diagnoses to fill three pages, it was as if all of my worst nightmares had been collected and breathed life into by some malevolent force.

I have a clinical, nearly impossible to defeat fear of dying; from the end of March, when the news first became dire, I would wake up, read the headlines, and cry uncontrollably for five or ten minutes every morning. I was convinced that despite my relatively rural location -- after having lived all over the U.S. and several other countries at various points in my life -- I was in constant danger from this horror of a virus. It got worse over the summer of 2020, when multiple illnesses and infections gave me near-constant symptoms perilously close to those of COVID: at one point, so convinced of my imminent mortality, I started making out my will again.

And then the fall came.

As a nontraditional college student with multiple disabilities, I had struggled to come back to formal education after excelling as a teenager, only to find that picking those responsibilities up again in the midst of adult poverty was nowhere near as easy as people in various online comment sections seem to think it is.

My wife and I had spent years homeless, living in a tent in the woods until an ice storm destroyed everything we had -- we fled to the library, the only dry place that would let us in -- and at one point were literally sleeping on the street and taking naps in shifts wherever we could find shelter: those in tiny pockets of authority, I have sadly discovered, love nothing more than bullying the homeless, routing them out of places they “don't belong,” and sending them back out into the cold. How they can go home feeling good about themselves I do not know, but I've seen it happen. Too many times to count.

The most morbid of these occurrences ended up happening after I'd been a fairly well-known street magician for a few years: with help from a wonderful donation from a local hardware store, I'd built a gloss-black six-foot coffin to use in escape routines, once even while the box itself was on fire. But at our lowest point, we found that the coffin was still stored outside the site I used to perform, and we got so desperate for a warm safe place to sleep that we tried squeezing, the pair of us, into it together.

A coffin. In an alley. In America.

The cracks you can fall through aren't cracks; they're chasms. I didn't screw up my life entirely with bad decisions; I didn't choose to get sick. And even though I admit wholeheartedly that there were a lot of points at which bad decisions were made, it becomes impossible to pull yourself up by those mythical bootstraps because they simply are not long enough. It didn't matter that I worked two jobs just a few years before that; that I speak two languages fluently; that I have computer and writing and tech and service skills galore. Please take it from me, even if you're heard it a hundred times before: it only takes one late paycheck or one dire emergency for a great deal of America to be out on the street. I'd say, "there but for the grace of God," only, I've been there.

People would say, "go to the churches!" We would call ten churches only to be told they "had no funds," or "were very sorry," and one memorable "Christian" homeless shelter refused us because I, as a trans man, might "confuse the children." (Yes, that is verbatim.) The "town," the phrase people mean here to stand for "public assistance," has more qualifying criteria than you'd imagine, and a person making $700 a month in SSI is "over their guidelines for assistance." The Salvation Army, for obvious reasons, refused to help. We got used to expired food from local food banks, one bout of vicious food poisoning from gone-over dairy notwithstanding. We survived.

So meanwhile, I was having eighteen spinal taps to drain the excess fluid from around my brain and spending the majority of my time in the hospital or debilitated, while my wife, an end-stage glaucoma patient who has had 29 surgeries since she was a year old, including three cornea transplants -- who has something like 12% of her working vision left -- would be outside panhandling so we didn't starve to death while most people walked by with their armfuls of bags and told her that they were "so sorry, but they only carried plastic!" -- but that they'd “pray for us.” That is, when they weren't actively sabotaging her or accusing her of being "on crack" for Christmas.

But I digress.

I came into UMF in the fall of 2019, grasping the chance to finally finish my education -- I'd started years prior, but was neither mentally nor financially prepared for the responsibilities of college -- like I'd grasp a line if I were drowning. The acute awareness I've always had of my own limited time on this earth, in no small part due to my illnesses but having always been a part of my personality that I never understood, has always driven me to want to leave something behind: to change the world for the better, to put something there that was not there before, to create. Being forgotten, having experienced the corners of this country and the depths of poverty that most of America seems to think is a moral failing and to not record it somehow, is horrifying to me: I have spent my life feeling as I've I've been living on an increasing amount of borrowed time. So when I came to UMF, it became my beacon in the dark, my handhold to climb out of the hole we were in, my singular chance.

My first semester, I could barely contain my excitement at being in school, despite the odd looks and laughs I got for being a much older student in a body of mostly-younger people. I remember sitting in class with the sunlight pouring onto my desk from the window and thinking, this is it, my God, I'm in college! All of those experiences that I had never had the chance to discover, I now had spread before me: a thousand doors that had remained firmly closed and locked to a minority disabled person scraping to survive were now cracking open. I used to marvel at things that most students took for granted: a library! A makerspace! Art supplies! Connections with people who not only listened, but discussed! And luckily for me, one or two professors that became mentors to me, teachers in the most classical sense.

One of the most defining moments of my education to date was having a UMF professor walking with me in conversation to the elevator one day, and when we discussed my fervent desire to succeed in school after so many horrible life events, she told me: "You're doing a good thing. You're doing the right thing."

Having that one person believe in me made all the difference; after being called every brand of failure extant in the world, feeling like success was something I deserved gave me the motivation to continue even as my health continued to deteriorate, even as there were days I ate once if at all.

(I remember one afternoon in the dining hall, my wife had been sitting with me at the table and had absentmindedly picked a leaf out of my salad. We've been together, through a life that at times would be unbelievable to the majority of students here, for sixteen years: it was a very old and unconscious habit. And almost immediately, the food service workers on duty came to our table to loudly call out and shame her and to admonish me that "we don't share food unless she pays for her own tray." I really wish they'd known what it's like to survive on other people's scraps, before I had to go and chase my weeping wife outside and tell her that it was okay, it didn't matter. But it's hard when you've already been driven from properties and places for panhandling, called names and told to get a job, had things thrown at you. It's funny, isn't it, how hard it is for grown adults to express a bit of compassion?

Still, I persisted. I love my school and was determined to do well, finally, but I wasn't helped along when in the spring semester of 2020, I started having trouble with increasing illness and mobility. I had asked the Sculpture instructor, as per my accommodation letter, if I couldn't do some alternative work that didn't require me to carry 2x4s on my mile and a half walk back and forth to school, while using a crutch; instead, I got a humiliating email suggesting that I simply drop the class instead. (Weeks later, when the entire class went to remote learning at the beginning of the pandemic, I asked if I couldn't just catch up then; I wasn't far behind. I was told “no, it doesn't seem feasible, let's try it some other semester.”) Another art teacher made the same suggestion as well: in an email that I still possess, with no introduction or greeting, that simply read "have you thought about just dropping the class?" Outraged and having shed tears over it, but seemingly with no recourse, I lost eight full credits despite work I had already done.

Yet, I was determined to do well. At the end of my first semester I was at a B- and felt as if I'd let down not only myself but my prospects as well; there was more than one moment when dropping out had actually crossed my mind. As the pandemic raged on, I became so desperately ill that I lost 37 lbs in seven weeks, due to an inability to eat or drink more than a tablespoon or so at a time. I battled recurring kidney infections and my teeth broke; I started having seizures right around the time my grandmother, the most beloved glue that held my family together, passed away. They switched my medications. I had a four-day blackout, constantly seizing. I ran a fever non-stop. And I held onto the idea that I needed to live long enough to make sure my wife would be settled and safe if anything happened to me: her disability would prevent her from that if I didn't start making plans in advance. A little plot, I thought, or an RV. Some place where no one could ever evict her from her home again, be it for emergency or -- as happens too often here -- unchecked bigotry.

And yet I had already signed on for a summer course, and during that period I discovered what would later turn out to be an amazing thing for me: Zoom did not require me to sit up. It did not require me to be at a desk, despite medication side effects. And it meant that even at my worst, I rarely had to miss a class.

As the fall semester loomed, Murphy's Law hit us hard. My landlord decided that, with almost no warning, he wanted the weird queer folks out of his trailer: we had nowhere else to go, no family or friends to take us in, not even a vehicle in which to sleep. Nowhere we looked would take us on without far, far more money than we had available. And despite the eviction moratorium, he brought the police to our door with no court order, no writ of possession, no legal right to do so whatsoever. When we tried to inform him of that, he had his guys physically break the locks out of our door-- on a weekend, mind you, when he knew the courts were closed. When we objected to the police -- who had just told us a month before that they had absolutely nothing to do with evictions, that even 48-hour notices were the jurisdiction of the sheriff's office and not the PD -- they became abusive, refused to listen to the fact that they were literally breaking the law, and threatened my adopted "brother" with arrest on the spot for trespass... from our legal home.

We lost everything.

Everything we'd managed to collect, every possession we hadn't moved onto campus, things we'd never thought we'd have again-- things like a dining table that my high school best friend had given us. The rest of our clothes. Winter coats. Books. Furniture. Everything. Gone, and there was no one but us to care.

Again.

That is how I started the fall semester in 2020.

I expected to struggle. I expected to have to carry the weight of my disability on top of the weight of my studies. But then, something happened.

I've seen dozens of articles at this point about how kids are failing, about how college students hate remote learning, how it doesn't feel “real.” Sites that pull in their revenue from clickbait had a field day with it. I've talked to several students just here at UMF who have said the same thing. And I don’t doubt the utter, absolute truth of that; but it seems to me that there is, or must be, a large subsection of students that aren't being written about as often or as loudly; whether it's because catastrophe generates clicks or because of some other reason, I think educators deserve to know that some of us, especially at the moment we need to the most, are finding that we are thriving on remote learning in ways and situations that would have left us behind otherwise.

I have seen that said: that if remote work and studies are necessary now, why haven't they been available to the disabled from the beginning? And I could add to that: why did I lose eight credits for work I could have done just as easily remotely? Why are the disabled told that "equality" means that they won't fire us for being disabled, but that they'll fire us if we can't “keep up with the work?” We've had to find workarounds for most of our lives, and despite the temptation it creates to become extraordinarily bitter and stop with that why? I feel more inclined to explain:

Not having to get up and physically walk to class when you have a mobility issue keeps not showing up for class from damaging a disabled student's grade. Not having to move from their room during class means that things like dizziness and nausea, medication side effects, insomnia, these things do not shut you out, cut you off, leave you mountains of interaction behind simply because your body is imperfect-- despite how often people overlook the fact that that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with your mind. Zoom classes give those students an opportunity to speak, to listen in, to do work at a pace and in a fashion that accommodates their disability-- all things, if I am to be absolutely honest, that we should be doing more of, exponentially, already. And when the pressure of an imperfect body or unpredictable mental health is removed from studies, there is then so much more room for that student to excel.

I am aware that remote learning isn't for everybody. And it shouldn't have to be. Like the illustration showing the difference between "equality" and "equity," every student needs different situations to thrive. So rather than worrying about homogenizing the educational experience, shouldn't we be taking lessons where we can from this horrible pandemic -- that has taken so much already from us, and continues to take more every single day -- and using them to shape the futures of those students who, in their futures, might be responsible for making sure we never fall down this nightmarish hole again?

I went from sleeping in bus stations those long years ago to a 4.0 this semester. If you'd asked me then if I saw myself here now, I would never have believed it: AP scores and CTY programs aside. Those things seem light-years away when you're so hungry the smell of bread from a Subway makes you want to cry.

But how many students with the potential to raise up both themselves and the literal idea of education itself have fallen into those cracks and holes-- and what can remote learning teach us about the best ways to help them? How can we move from this idea that we as a culture have maintained since the days of child labor and broken-backed railroad workers: that if your body is not central to your labor, then that labor is therefore worthless? How many great minds have been lost to the obscurity of poverty because of the prevalence of this mindset?

Accessibility is the key to success. Compassion is the key to accessibility. Everyone deserves that chance. Even technically homeless now, typing this from my singular dorm room in the space between semesters, I will stand by that opinion.

If only more of the people responsible for the framework of our education would consider it as well.