I found this chapter interesting given our current curriculum here at Texas State: as a student of

general education, I am only required to take one Special Education class, but as a student of bilingual
education, I am required to take an entire semester of classes focused on integrating English and
Spanish in the classroom. It seems that we should have a class focused on teaching strategies and a class
focused on learning styles as well as (or instead of) the blanket Special Education class. Schwarz pointed
out that those who become general educators typically hold the belief that they have put enough effort
into becoming a good teacher and do not need to continue to learn and strive for inclusion because just
being a good teacher to a few students is good enough. To hold with the main idea of this No Double
Standards chapter he reveals that those who become special education teachers feel the same way, if
the opposite, that they have put enough effort into becoming teachers for those we feel are
disadvantaged in talent and do not need to master the general curriculum because it does not apply to
them. My question for them is this: What do you expect to teach if you do not teach the TEKS? I can see
that most people view students with disabilities as incapable of learning the general curriculum, and this
may be true to the degree that some students with disabilities will struggle to learn the TEKS at the
same pace, with the same amount of accommodation, and in the same form as students that are
currently called general education students, but I think it is still important to teach these students as
much as possible.
A huge, important shift in educational thinking is that of openness to new ideas, especially in
instruction. I remember having teachers who had the mindset of my way or the highway. Either you
learned the lesson the way they taught it or not at all. I recall in middle and high school that I and my
classmates would sometimes struggle to understand the processes teachers taught us, particularly in
math, where they often did not explain the concept but simply showed how to solve the problem. When
we expressed our frustrations they would simply teach the same exact process over again, lacking
alternatives that we might have understood better.