Speaking Legalese
by Joanie Calem
As a songwriter, I used to write songs to help me figure out what was going on in our lives as we helped our son maneuver a world that was not really set up to help people like him, people with autism, ADD and learning disabilities.
This song, Speaking Legalese, was written many years ago, inspired by conversations that I would have with the parents who came to my “concert-conversations” in those years, where we would all commiserate about IEP meetings, trying to establish and support learning systems that would work for our kids…and being inundated by acronyms of various sorts. Along with all of the other challenges of parenting, parenting someone who is deemed “special” by the school system seems to mean that we needed to learn a new language, and all of the accompanying laws that surround the system and the support protocols. My head would be spinning after those meetings, praying that I had made the right choices, feeling like I had just walked through some multiple choice maze blindfolded and unable to hear clearly.
Elementary and middle school had been one long minefield of trying to avoid explosions or meltdowns, either on his part or on the teachers’ parts! It was another era, when far less was known about autism or sensory overload, and schools were far less equipped to help support teachers and students grappling with the natural sensory overload of classroom life, let alone the overload that happens to someone who suffers from Sensory Processing Disorder.
For the most part, in the latter years of his schooling, he was surrounded by wonderful loving teachers who truly cared about him and went out of their way to make school work for him.
I still need a cheat sheet to remember what all of these acronyms mean! See how many you are familiar with. They are all listed in the file of IEP documents that we have.
Note: for anyone with a hearing disability, the lyrics are all listed in the description below the video, and you can also press the CC button to get the captions!
Learn more about musician and educator Joanie Calem’s work here.