Every classroom that penalizes students for distributed modes of attention organizes learning according to a neurotypicalThe existence of the word neurotypical makes it possible to have conversations about topics like neurotypical privilege. Neurotypical is a word that allows us to talk about members of the… More norm. Every classroom that sees the moving body as the distracted body is organized according to a neurotypical norm. Every classroom that teaches predominantly for one mode of perception is organizing its learning according to a norm. Every classroom that knows in advance what knowledge looks and sounds like is working to a norm.

Histories of Violence: Neurodiversity and the Policing of the Norm

Ordinary tried to fix me
I was a threat to a page in history
Miss me with the treatment, doo-wop bleaching
Straighten my kinky with a new pop Legion

--Talent by Swamburger

Challenging that myth of normal is a philosophical imperative because we are doubling down normal.

The myth of normal is what’s broken, and the identity that, if you don’t fit it, that you are less than, that’s what’s broken. We need to reframeWhen we successfully reframe public discourse, we change the way the public sees the world. We change what counts as common sense. Because language activates frames, new language is required… More what we problematize, not bodies, not difference, but this pervasive imperative to be normal.

We didn’t have the word normal in the English language until the 1860s. Normal is a product linguistically of the industrial revolution , of standardizing production, of moving in a place that’s forcing people to fit that standardized mold. Normal is a statistical concept, not a fact in the world.

All progress, all evolutionShe tells of a radical fringe of scientists who are realizing that natural selection isn’t individual, but mutual—that species only survive if they learn to be in community.Emergent Strategy: Shaping… More, is driven by deviations from the norms.

All evolution and progress is driven by mutations and deviations. If we lose that, if we eradicate that, we have lost our strength as a community, as a society.

Jonathan Mooney

They're declaring war on your norms

Selling yourself short tames the vision 
How you're depicted can change the sentence

Innocent by Swamburger

Is anything as strange as a normal person?
Is anyone as cruel as a normal person?
Waiting after school for you
They want to know if you
If you're normal too
Well, are you?
Are you?

I'm so confused, am I a normal person?
You know, I can't tell if I'm a normal person, it's true
I think I'm cool enough, but am I cruel enough?
Am I cruel enough, for you?

The normal body, invented in the nineteenth century as a departure from the ideal body, has shifted over to a new concept: the normal ideal.

Lennard J. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy

Ian Hacking summed it up when he wrote that the word normal, with its attendant meanings, “whispers in your ear that what is normal is also all right.”

Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

You need to know that normal has a history. You may assume that this is a history of discovery—that somewhere, at some point, someone found out what was normal for human beings. And normal, and normal people, are often presented like that—as facts in the world. But that’s not true. That is a lie. It’s a lie that gives normal such power in our lives. And while normal has a history, it is not a history of discovery, but a history of invention. Normal hasn’t always been normal.

Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

What is average, however, is often called normal—and what is called normal becomes the norm.

Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

You are normal if your behavior, appearance, and background are the dominant culture. You are normal if you fit into this culture and are therefore deemed normal by the school, the church, the town, the doctor, the professor. Normal is what works in society’s norms. This is a whole new tautology—normal is what is called normal by people who are considered normal.

What a mess the twentieth century made out of normal.

Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

Normal has always been propped up by and constructed on the bodies and lives of the not normal. And to be on the bottom of that pile, to be the negation of normal that is its foundation, is to not just differ from normal; it is to be normal’s opposite—abnormal—which is false and wrong.

Just because normal isn’t a fact doesn’t mean it hasn’t been used to dehumanize people with differences. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Like normal, abnormal has a history, not of discovery but of invention. As you make your life, you need to know this history and the process and systems of normalization that have turned natural differences among humans into abnormalities to be diagnosed, categorized, and then of course, corrected. You are round pegs, as we all are, and no matter how much I try, I can’t protect you from the relentless message that you must fit the square hole.

Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

The sorting of typical humans into hierarchicalThe belief in the existence and relevance of social hierarchies must be suspended.The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations The extent to which a community… More medical categories of difference was not inevitable. Human differences had been, before this sorting, interrupted in other ways. Charles Darwin proved that all evolution was fueled by variation. Before the category of the abnormal, people with cognitive and physical differences were often considered wonderful, eccentric, remarkable, singular, extraordinary, queerBeing queer means constantly questioning what’s considered “normal” and why that norm gets privileged over other ways of being. It means criticizing who sets these norms and recognizing the privilege… More, odd, strange, whimsical, absurd, and curious. According to Henri-Jacques Stiker, a disability historian, people with cognitive and physical differences during the Middle Ages “were spontaneously part of a world and of a society that was acceptedAcceptance means training mental health service providers to look at autism and other disabilities as a part of a person’s identity, rather than a problem that needs to be fixed. Acceptance… More as being multifaceted.”

What changed?

Difference became abnormality when the probability theorists, skull counters, and shrinks who brought us normal become coconspirators with the great sorters of the early twentieth century. Normal emerged, side by side and arm in arm, with the rise of science as a tool to describe and make sense out of the world. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, biologists created systems to categorize the natural world, astronomers mapped the sky, geographers the world, and anatomists the human body. Normal lurked in the background, drawing a line in these charts and systems between what was acceptable and what was not—and we all know that the not is abnormal.

Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

Normal was used to create dehumanizing categories of social disqualification, based on a narrow continuum of acceptable human variation—the grand total of which was none. This biologically based, scientifically justified discrimination disqualified a wide range of humans and had a huge impact on atypical bodies and minds. Variability becomes disability, abnormality, and pathology. From here on, this medical model will become the foundation for how society makes sense of, addresses, and treats cognitive and physical differences. The medical model makes variability synonymous with sickness and puts the social “problem” to be solved in the person, not the environment around the person.

The great sorting and pathologizing of difference are still with us today. This is dangerous, because if there is one thing I know, really know to my core, it’s that to define deviations from the norm as a deficit or disorder or abnormality is the first step in making a person into a problem to be fixed and a sickness to be cured.

Normal Sucks: How to Live, Learn, and Thrive, Outside the Lines

But I don't need a cure for me
I don't need it
No, I don't need a cure for me
I don't need it
No, I don't need a cure for me
I don't need it
I don't need it

Please, no cure for me
Please, no cure for me

--Cure for Me by AURORA

Further readingThere are three types of reading: eye reading, ear reading, and finger reading.The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan: A Blueprint for Renewing Your Child’s Confidence and Love of Learning Most schools and… More,