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Was my 8th grade math teacher ableist? I am currently a sophomore in high school as of March 2024. Just now have I started thinking about this story again and wondering whether my math teacher from eighth grade was ableist. I have a severe stutter and have had it for a long time. Almost every sentence that comes out of my mouth has at least one disrupt in fluency, but it doesn't really have a specific pattern for when it does or doesn't. 8th grade was not different. I had this math teacher, who I will be referring to as Mr. L. Mr. L was very stoic and no-nonsense, very rarely ever cracking a smile. When we ever saw him smile or heard him laugh (which I could literally count on one hand), it scared the shit out of us all. Anyway, I was very active in his class, raising my hand to answer very frequently. But since near the start of the 2021-2022 school year, he almost immediately noticed that I had difficulty speaking. Since then, I started to take notice of a pattern of him very rarely picking me to answer questions, even when I've had my hand up the whole time. This on its own sounds like a nothing burger, but with how frequently and fairly he picked on the rest of the class (who were all ABLED speakers), it started ringing alarm bells in my head, and only served to strengthen my already preexisting insecurities. One particular incident was when I had my hand raised to answer as always, and he looked over at me, and gave me hope to be able to be hands-on and interactive with the lesson as I intended. But as he looked at me dead in the eyes, he said another kid's name. This would be understandable if the kid in question was sitting nearby to where I was, but the issue was that the particular kid he called on was **ACROSS THE ROOM** from me. Even 13-year-old me was aware enough to be disgusted by this, and to know that there is little chance that it was an accident. You don't just ACCIDENTALLY look someone in the eyes to give them hope and then say the name of someone else that wasn't even CLOSE to where you were looking. This behavior of rarely picking me to answer prolonged throughout the year, and he usually chose me once or maybe twice a day, if at all. At the time I was 100% sure that it was linked to my speech impediment, but now I'm questioning it again. Did Mr. L really have ableist intentions, or was I just upset over nothing? It's driving me nuts now and I really need to know if I was overreacting or not.