The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal

THE SHORT BUS (2007) A Journey beyond Normal Jonathan Mooney Jonathan Mooney struggled as a student due to severe dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and anxiety. The Short Bus chronicles his social and emotional travels throughout the United States in an old “short bus,” searching for encounters with a wide variety of people classified as disabled or perceived as different from the norm. OVERVIEW In The Short Bus: A Journey beyond Normal, Jonathan Mooney chronicles his social and emotional travels throughout the United States in an old short bus, the slang term for the bright yellow vehicle historically used to transport youths with disabilities to and from school. Mooney’s struggles as a student due to severe dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and anxiety left an indelible imprint upon him. Despite setbacks—including not learning to read until he was twelve years old—he earned a degree with honors in English literature from Brown University. He recorded his experiences navigating an educational system hostile to students with dyslexia in the best-selling book Learning outside KEY FACTS Subject: Jonathan Mooney Occupation: Writer Nationality: American Genre: Memoir Time Period: Early 21st century Historical Context: Development of historical construct of a normal citizen Rise of disability categories such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, learning disabilities, and intellectual disabilities the Lines: Two Ivy League Students with Learning Disabilities and ADHD Give You the Tools for Academic Success and Educational Revolution (2000), which he coauthored with David Cole. Subsequently, Mooney’s interests in disability and resiliency in general grew as he investigated the mutually constitutive concepts of normality and abnormality. The Short Bus chronicles his search for encounters with a wide variety of people classified as disabled or perceived as different from the norm. He seeks to engage himself and the reader by challenging society’s notions of normality. The Short Bus is a mixture of odyssey, personal adventure, road trip, documentary, memoir, and quest for self-knowledge. Throughout the text, Mooney recalls childhood memories of his family that molded him, school experiences that terrified him, university life that changed him, and contemporary relationships that shaped him in maturity. Over the course of his trip across the country, which covered 35,000 miles and took four months in 2004, Mooney candidly reveals his vulnerability and prejudices. He scrutinizes attitudes about disability that pervade society and the ways misinformation shapes public opinion, and he considers how society might conceptualize human differences in more inclusive, less oppressive ways. People he meets include Ashley, a deaf-blind girl who signs profanity at her teachers; Cookie, an intellectually impaired six-foot-five cross-dressing former fisherman; Katie, a young woman with Down syndrome and a congenital heart defect who maybe wants “to be ordinary, not exceptional”; Jeff, a man with Asperger’s syndrome who writes copious and curiously touching lists; Brent, a once-suicidal dyslexic; and Butch, an artist and keeper of the Museum of Wonder, located in a shed in rural Alabama, that “walked the line between spectacle and freakdom.” Mooney also visits the Burning Man festival in the C Key Concepts Dyslexia Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) Learning disability Activism Self-advocacy Society’s notion of normality Neurodiversity Travel 679 COPYRIGHT 2019 Gale, a Cengage Company WCN 02-200-210 THE SHORT BUS PRIMARY SOURCE Excerpt from The Short Bus When I was a child, my world was always out of control. The essence of a learning disability is that so much is called into question, a child’s ability to learn, for example, which is considered basic human nature. My dyslexia was a long struggle to use language to make sense of the world. All of that is on shaky ground when the first words that you see on the page mean nothing; when you sit in first grade and stare at a page that shakes like a heat line in a mirage; when the nausea of confusion and the fear of explosion overwhelmed your five-year-old frame. My fear always was that someone would come and point at me and say, “You’re out. Sorry, man.” By out, I guess I mean out of the real world, a freak out all alone. I dealt with this feeling of being out of control with a subtle form of violence—toward myself, toward others. When I was in middle school, I decided I would not eat anything that had more than five grams of fat in it. I remember standing in a clothing store next to the Ice Box, a candy shop in Manhattan Beach, as Sue, who worked there, measured my waist. I’d gone up a size and I brought my hands to my collar bones to make sure I still felt them protruding because that’s how I knew I was thin enough. This need to control, this form of violence against myself was played out in some of my relationships as well. Growing up, only one kid knew about my learning disability: Steve. He was on my soccer team, and we looked like we could have been brothers. In seventh grade we both cut our hair the same way, short, almost shaved bangs and long mullets. Neither of us could read, but I was cruel to him and gave the nickname Stupid Steve. It stuck at school. In this world of hierarchies, I guess we all need something beneath us. Ultimately, my self-loathing led to loneliness and hopelessness. I had a plan for suicide by the time I was twelve. I wrote it out longhand in my best handwriting. I remember feeling ashamed that I hadn’t mastered cursive. Even in my note, which I wrote and rewrote, the curved lines were either too short or too tall. My dad saved me, told me after a baseball game that he loved me and it didn’t matter how I did in school. SOURCE: Mooney, Jonathan. The Short Bus: A Journey beyond Normal. New York, Henry Holt, 2007, p. 95. Nevada desert, where people shed culturally conceived norms to meet, mingle, create art, and “do their thing,” before the culminating event of setting ablaze temporary art installations, most notably the towering figure of a man. Mooney’s trip comes full circle as he returns to his family’s home in California, where he meditates on his exploration of normality and reaffirms his identity, this time on his own terms, as “a short-bus rider.” Because of his first book, Mooney had already become widely successful and established himself as a public speaker, a spokesman for children, youth, and adults with dyslexia, ADHD, and other learning disabilities. He had gained national recognition in the form of awards, features on television, and invitations to deliver keynote addresses. In 1998 he cofounded Project Eye to Eye, a nationwide network of successful people with learning challenges who provide mentorship, guidance, and support to children and youth who struggle academically, socially, and emotionally in schools. The Short Bus galvanized Mooney’s disability activism. HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT On the surface, The Short Bus is an autobiographical account of Mooney’s journey around the country and of the people he meets during that time. However, he blends past memories and contemporary experiences into an ongoing mediation of perceptions of normality that becomes more profound with every personal recollection and each new encounter. He asks readers to take the journey with him and challenges them to reframe their concept of disabilities as natural forms of human differences. As Mooney gets to know each person he visits on his trip, he takes the opportunity to contextualize the specific personal history of their disability— including dyslexia, deaf-blindness, ADHD, Down syndrome, intellectual impairment, mental illness, among others. While these historical accounts are snapshots, they provide a framework for considering the development of attitudes toward specific disabilities. For example, in visiting Katie, Mooney engages with her mother, Candee. From her he learns that because of advances in heart surgery, people with Down syndrome now have a much longer projected life span than they did in the 1960s, and there is abundant evidence of those with Down syndrome living full, contented lives. In his historical accounts of learning disabilities and ADHD, Mooney similarly shifts the dialogue from deficit, disorder, and dysfunction, which reflect the discourse of the medical establishment, to one of the naturalness of neurodiversity. Mooney reconceptualizes these ways of being as cognitive differences rather than disabilities, exemplifying his recognition that people’s attitudes are the greatest inhibitors those with physical or mental differences face to being integrated into all aspects of society. Mooney also addresses educational laws within the United States, including the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (1975), which developed, through several iterations, into the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, 1990), a federal law to ensure that children with disabilities are afforded free access to education that serves their individual needs and ensures their fair protection. Most individuals he features are discussed within the context of public education, and the ways in DISABILITY EXPERIENCES C VOL. 2 680 COPYRIGHT 2019 Gale, a Cengage Company WCN 02-200-210 THE SHORT BUS Author Jonathan Mooney. © SARAH SMALL which the school system and people it employs serve to enable or disable children and youth. In particular, he illustrates ways in which teachers have significantly influenced the experience of children and families. For example, Candee was confronted by a teacher who asked, “Do you realize I spent two weeks in the hospital because I knew I was going to have your daughter in my classroom?” In another example, Mooney describes the pain and humiliation experienced in the educational system by Brent, who is dyslexic. At one point Brent’s teacher publicly humiliated him for not being able to read, an experience, according to Mooney, “that permanently changes a kid in ways no one ever really understands —even the kid.” Mooney’s observations throughout refer to the inclusive education movement that has made progress over the past several decades, yet he indicates that it is a work in progress. THEMES A central theme of The Short Bus is the valuing of counter-narratives over the dominant discourse of normality that inflicts harmful effects onto those who fall outside of its parameters. Each person’s story is one of resilience in what can be a hostile world, where negative attitudes toward differences are indiscernible to most people without disabilities. Mooney focuses on the value of disability and a desire to explore the human condition through engaging with others who have experienced life outside of the norm. In his first book, Learning outside the Lines, Mooney’s vantage point is that of an outsider who seeks to learn from other outsiders and facilitate connecting a minority community with shared experiences of marginalization, discrimination, and oppression. His goal in The Short Bus is to render visible a community that is often invisible to the nondisabled world—and arguably, other disabled people too—a community that has much to offer, including “the values, beliefs, and unique forms of knowledge that arise not despite disability but from the experience of being disabled in America.” The style of The Short Bus is informal. The author’s voice is strongly present throughout as he opens up to his own fears, prejudices, and lack of knowledge. At the same time, whatever his anxieties and self-doubts, Mooney follows his instincts and seeks answers about how to redefine disability, how to understand the process by which people overcome negative attitudes to realize their fullest potential. Mooney examines his own prejudices, as well. In one instance, he is spurred by his interaction with cross-dresser Cookie to reflect upon a time in high school in which he reduced another student to tears in the hallway by calling him “faggy.” Similarly, the author is, at first, unsure of what to expect from, and how to interact with, Ashley, born with fetal alcohol syndrome, whom he initially believes to be damaged and abnormal. However, after spending time with Ashley in her school and family contexts, Mooney comes to see her as a fully developed and DISABILITY EXPERIENCES C VOL. 2 681 COPYRIGHT 2019 Gale, a Cengage Company WCN 02-200-210 THE SHORT BUS “DYSTEACHIA” In his memoir, Jonathan Mooney introduces several examples of the abject terror of schooling for some students who cannot meet culturally determined expectations and academic performance requirements. The physical fear and anxiety is palpable, yet arguably not recognized by many educators, and in extreme cases leads to suicide ideation. Alan Raymond and Susan Raymond’s 2011 documentary film Journey into Dyslexia opens with Mooney presenting to a high school audience. He calls upon his past experiences and openly mocks the system that labels students in a myriad of ways, claiming “dysteachia,” or poor teaching, is the core problem. In his reversal of tables, he argues that the structure of current school systems’ education of teachers is woefully inadequate to meet the needs of children and youth with learning problems. The film then cuts to a series of students talking about how difficult school can be and how they perpetually struggle not to give up. By extension, in The Short Bus, we see how school serves as a microcosm of society, which can be incredibly difficult to navigate and, for some, a perpetual struggle. Yet, The Short Bus is a testimony to surviving and thriving, and doing so on one’s own terms—against the odds. Because Mooney has managed to do this himself (with the help of others, such as his mother, wife, and family), he seeks to share what he has learned and assertively challenge the status quo, recognizing that what society has called disabilities are normal variations among us all. complex person rather than simply a girl missing two of her five senses. At times brash with self-assurance and at others humble, Mooney’s voice in The Short Bus reveals a drive to seek a higher consciousness through reformulating human differences by claiming the beauty, value, and worth of those distinctions. He encourages readers to contemplate what they think about human differences and why, to consider the origin of that knowledge and the questionable concept of normal that most take for granted. Ultimately, Mooney recognizes that disability is normal and, as a selfadvocate and activist, he adopts this as his message for the world. CRITICAL RESPONSE Although Mooney features people like himself with dyslexia and ADHD in The Short Bus, he purposefully casts a large net to understand others’ disabilities in ways he wants others to understand his own. In a 2007 review of the book for the Los Angeles Times, Susan Salter Reynolds outlined many of the issues raised, sampling both painful and funny anecdotes from Mooney and the people he features. She concluded, “What makes this journey so inspiring is Mooney’s transcendent humor; the self he has become does not turn away from old pain but can laugh at it, make fun of it, make it into something beautiful.” Mick Sussman (2007) of the New York Times called the portraits “endearing,” noting that Mooney “makes some discordant attempts at philosophizing in this chatty narrative.” He was critical of some of Mooney’s ideas, such as his suggestion “that reading remediation is a waste of time in some cases,” though Mooney himself “suffered as a child not just because he was ostracized but also because he simply wanted to read and couldn’t.” Sussman contended that “it’s not necessarily more compassionate to tolerate disabilities than to correct them.” Emily C. Roiphe (2007) provided a similarly mixed review praising the overall idea and “the optimistic realism” of the author, yet expressing disappointment in the depth of characters portrayed. In sum, Mooney’s Short Bus calls attention to how disabilities signify the underdog, the misunderstood, the pariah, the outcast, the failure. While pointing out how unjust this situation is, he also chronicles the resilience of humans who have been forcibly placed outside the circle of normality. Ultimately, he is convinced that “If more short-bus stories were told, the world would be a better place.” David J. Connor Professor of Special Education and Learning Disabilities Hunter College (NY) BIBLIOGRAPHY Mooney, Jonathan. The Short Bus: A Journey beyond Normal. New York, Henry Holt, 2007. Sources Journey into Dyslexia. Documentary film, directed by Alan Raymond and Susan Raymond. HBO, 2011. Reynolds, Susan Salter. “A Special Ed Bus Ride to Enlightenment.” Review of The Short Bus, by Jonathan Mooney, Los Angeles Times, 22 June 2007. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018. Roiphe, Emily C. “‘Not Normal’ but Not Alone.” Review of The Short Bus, by Jonathan Mooney, Minneapolis Star Tribune, 10 June 2007, p. 14F. Sussman, Mick. Review of The Short Bus, by Jonathan Mooney, New York Times, 16 Sept. 2007. Accessed 18 Apr. 2018. Selected Works by Mooney Learning outside the Lines: Two Ivy League Students with Learning Disabilities and ADHD Give You the Tools for Academic Success and Educational Revolution. With David Cole. New York, Fireside, 2000. “The Dyslexic Brain Kicks Ass.” The Brown Reader: 50 Writers Remember College Hill, edited by Judy Sternlight. New York, Simon and Schuster, 2014, pp. 166–68. “You Are Special! Now Stop Being Different.” New York Times, 12 Oct. 2017. Accessed 20 Apr. 2018. DISABILITY EXPERIENCES C VOL. 2 682 COPYRIGHT 2019 Gale, a Cengage Company WCN 02-200-210 THE SHORT BUS Further Resources Connor, David J. Urban Narratives: Portraits in Progress— Life at the Intersections of Learning Disability, Race, and Social Class. New York, Peter Lang, 2008. Flink, David. Thinking Differently: An Inspiring Guide for Parents of Children with Learning Disabilities. New York, HarperCollins, 2014. Lee, Christopher, and Rosemary Jackson. Faking It: A Look into the Mind of a Creative Learner. Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann Educational, 1992. Rodis, Pano, Andrew Garrod, and Mary Lynn Boscardin, editors. Learning Disabilities and Life Stories. Boston, Allyn and Bacon, 2001. Rooke, Margaret, editor. Creative, Successful, Dyslexic: 23 High Achievers Share Their Stories. London, Jessica Kingsley, 2015. Weinstein, Allen. Memoirs of a Learning Disabled, Dyslexic, Multi-millionaire. New York, Page, 2015. Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York, Harper Perennial, 2007. DISABILITY EXPERIENCES C VOL. 2 683 COPYRIGHT 2019 Gale, a Cengage Company WCN 02-200-210