«My Desk Partner» won't be assigned as a class essay this year. The defining feature of autumn 2020—upended by COVID-19, interrupted school days, distance learning, and the rush of technology—is the single-desk classroom. No cheating attempts. No whispered answers or pencil scribbles across the desktop. No congratulatory pat on the shoulder after a bad exam, no embrace for work done well. It's a strange new feeling that will mark this "COVID generation," but for some, it's nothing new.
Children with disabilities live surrounded by adults, white and green coats, masks, waiting rooms, medical visits. School is their only chance to be among peers, to play, to grow as equals—to watch and learn for the sake of playing, not for exercise. Yet students with disabilities often have part-time desk partners, if they have any at all.
I don't remember who sat next to me in elementary or middle school. I remember Mattia in high school, chosen for me by the others.
I don't remember who sat next to me in elementary or middle school.I remember Mattia in high school, chosen for me by the others.
David Anzalone, a comedian with cerebral palsy, described his desk assignment on the first day of first grade with a joke: "In the end, it was me and the radiator left—and in September it wasn't even on." I don't remember my own desk partners from elementary or middle school either. The first one I can recall is Mattia, who shared my first year of scientific high school. He was top of the class, and mine wasn't a choice—it was a necessity. He carried all the books, always, and let me decide what to bring, lightening my backpack.
Mattia was chosen for me by others, by adults, because he sat in the front row near the door and the blackboard. And because on the first day of school, I arrived in the classroom last—not because I was late, but because a student with a disability spends most of the first day learning about their support system: the school aide and the staff. Classmates can wait.
— Read also: And the Right to an Education?
This year, the sense of strangeness and loneliness belongs to everyone. Classrooms look like chessboards now. Students are taught to keep their distance, to wash their hands, to sanitize with gel, to wear masks in the hallways in single file, more than a meter apart. Hoping that a new lockdown doesn't force them all back behind a screen and distance learning.
It could be a chance to understand, to put yourself in someone else's shoes. A kind of sabbatical year, when adults and students might for a while live as those classmates with different abilities live—and maybe, next year, they'll show up on the first day of school wanting to sit next to that student with different abilities, ready to discover them over the long months ahead. To find out, we'll have to wait until September 2021.