Back in high school, as part of my IEP, I was “allowed” (by which I mean forced) to take my tests in a different room from the other students. This other room was the resource teacher’s classroom, and she tried to be “accommodating” by removing all of the very distracting flyers from her walls and making the room into a sterile white box which I was not allowed to leave until my test was finished. In addition, the room was completely silent with the exception of a printer, which had a blinking LED in standby mode and occasionally woke up the WiFi chip to check for new print jobs. It whined like ANYTHING. If tuning out a constant whine that alternated between two pitches every half second wasn’t hard enough, every ten seconds, it would go up to a third, higher pitch, warble for a second or so, then go back to the first two.

I was stuck in that room for an hour every day after school because no one could figure out what was taking me so long to finish my exams (even after I told them). (They wouldn’t let me unplug the printer during that hour, naturally – what if the resource teacher suddenly needs to send a print job to it from across campus, while coaching the volleyball team?) It’s been four years since I graduated and I’m still mad.

(Oh, right, I forgot to mention – the resource teacher was also the volleyball coach, so she couldn’t stay to monitor my tests. The person who did was a middle aged lady who spent the entire time on her Chromebook and occasionally interrupted my test to show me a Facebook meme. She didn’t even look at me apart from that.)