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Showing posts from January, 2026

The True Meaning Of "Para"

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         The Olympics, to me, have always just been athletes competing for a medal. Whenever I have watched the Olympics and Paralympics, I have always thought that these names were different due to one displaying people with physical disabilities competing and the other displaying people with no physical issues. The truth is, the only noticeable difference is in what we can physically see with our own eyes. It is similar to confirmation bias, which is when you believe what you see, and see what you believe. I thought that para was associated with the physical disability just by what I saw, but in reality, it was completely different.    Once I learned that the true meaning of "para" was beside. This meant that the Paralympics are associated directly with the Olympics. Originally, I thought para meant paraplegic, meaning someone losing function or sensory in a lower area of their body. The whole point of the Paralympics is so that even though the athl...

My Relationship to Disability

       Growing up in a small town, I was not exposed to people with disabilities at a young age. Once I was in high school, I had gained a small amount of exposure to people with disabilities; this included the Special Olympics club I was in, which helped host events for kids with disabilities, like baseball games, kickball, occasionally eating lunch with them, and a prom! This gave me an idea of what it is like, then once I got into college, I was exposed to a whole new world. My Experience     One specific experience that helped me learn more about disabilities was in my sophomore year of college, in my Ethics and Teamwork class. In this class, we were required to complete a service learning experience as teams. For my service learning, I chose to go to The Arc, and developing and implementing this service-learning project as a team was a very engaging experience. A lot was learned along the way; I learned a lot about my team and how helping the com...