Stories and Handicapped Children Not all good writers write good disabled charact

Young Mutants (438), edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin Greenberg, and Charles Waugh, is a collection of short stories by different authors. Unifying each of them is a young protagonist who has some genetic mutation. Though many of their mutations are beneficial, they are nonetheless of a sort that another disabled child might be able to sympathize with.

Unfortunately, what a child would be less likely to sympathize with would be the way in which each child finds a situation where his or her particular "disability" is actually useful. Wish fulfillment is a common element of science fiction. The teacher's use of this collection of stories would have to be at the discretion of how much the stories would engender unreal expectations of wish fullfilment on the part of the disabled students. They are more than likely not supermen. While imagination is important, the older the child is, the more he or she needs to prepare for the reality of adul

. . .
to this is bathrooms: the student probably will not have arm muscles sufficiently developed to be able to hoist himself out of a chair and onto a toilet. Alice Walker's To Hell with Dying (15253) concerns the part of her life when she knew a man who had diabetes. Mr. Sweet (apparently his real name, but if so, an ironic one) played guitar and had periodic bouts of illness because of his diabetes. He was also an alcoholic. Treatment of his illnesses consisted of Ms. Walker and her family rallying to his side and sufficiently buoying his spirits so that he recovered. Alice Walker's difficulty is perhaps that she is too good an author. Her final scene with Mr. Sweet is fictionalized and well done. However, sentences like "It did not occur to us that if our own father had been dying we could not have stopped it, that Mr. Sweet was the only person over whom we had power" (Robertson 152) beg parsing. Elementary-level readers will certainly not be able to read this book, despite the label "Grades 25." This leaves high school, which is unfortunate, because getting a healthy fear of eating too much sugar as a child would be a good thing. High school students would enjoy this book, both because it is only 32 pages long and bec
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Winged Dragon, GreenHaired Kid, Sweet POSSLQ, Butterflies Free, Charles Waugh, Eddie Gary, Alice Walker's, , Society SCIL, Hell Dying, providence nj bowker, teenagers ed, robertson providence nj, ed debra, debra robertson, annotated bibliography, bibliography fiction, fiction children, debra robertson providence, bowker 1992, teenagers ed debra, nj bowker, ed debra robertson, robertson providence, providence nj,
Approximate Word count = 2485
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)