Local shrew Regina LaMahieu was overwhelmed with emotion after a recent disability simulation in which she sat in a wheelchair for five minutes before standing of her own accord and exiting the room in tears.
The shrew, a sixth-grade teacher, organized the simulation when one of her students called another a “gimp” after that student came to school in a leg cast. This escalated into a barrage of other insults. When students did not heed her demand to cease ridiculing the injured student, LaMahieu said it would be a benefit to their education to feel what it is like to be disabled. “Then you’ll see how funny it is to call someone a ‘gimp’!”
On the morning of the simulation, LaMahieu vowed to teach from a wheelchair for the day. Soon, however, she lost focus, turned somber and started to cry. “I don’t know how these people do it, going around all … wheely, and with no legs …” The students looked at one another in confusion.
“I’m sorry, it’s just so uncomfortable here,” she said of the up-to-date, heavily cushioned electric chair. “Can you imagine this? Being a person made of spokes, wires and metal? Because your real parts don’t work?”
It was at this point that LaMahieu broke from her goal and departed the room with wet eyes, more or less convinced of the atrocity of having a disability, determined to save the experience as a reminder of what it is like to be, in her estimation, irreparable and only half-human. In her absence, the students commandeered the vacant chair and quickly descended into a pecking order reminiscent of “Lord of the Flies,” making second-class all those who did not possess the power of the chair.