When I was still teaching chemistry at the technical college, I had a student one semester who was epileptic and neither she nor the disability services office thought it important to inform her lab instructor of the possibility of a seizure by this student during lab. She was subject to occasional grand mal seizures and I was appalled that the powers that be thought that the lab instructor didn't need to know that possibility existed.
My imagination could come up with scenarios of what such a seizure occuring during a dangerous lab procedure would be like. How much damage that could occur to the student herself or to nearby students if the student has a grand mal seizure during a lab period? It seemed really dangerous to me, to not know of the possibility of the student having a seizure when handling concentrated acid or setting up glassware for an experiment, or simply falling off a lab stool?
But apparently the legalities of students with a handicap or medical condition are that the information need not be given to me legally. But without knowing it, how could I keep her safe? If I had a color blind student, for example, I needed to know so I can have the student's partner to be the one monitoring color changes in an experiment, since the color blind student wouldn't be able to determine what color was seen. And disability services told me I couldn't even do this.
My point being that without knowing about such a benign "disability" I would not be able to help that student be successful in those labs involving seeing color. There's no danger to anyone, except to the grade of the student who cannot see color the same way as the other students do. And I was told it was illegal to ask if a student could see color.
So obviously, it's illegal to ask if anyone happens to be epileptic, but without knowing it and without being told how to manage a seizure if that student had one, how would I have been able to keep her safe? I could assign the normal vision partner the task of doing the titration and seeing the end point, but without knowing, how could I make sure the epileptic student was safe? If I knew, would it have been wrong to not let that student handle concentrated strong acids? The disability services office said it would be. So my question is, how can it be wrong to want to keep that student safe?
I never got an answer to this that I agreed with in terms of keeping my chemistry lab students safe. So how can it be right to not assure my student's safety?
Meg Osterby
