Like any other class would be, we were very excited to be meeting a new girl. According to my teacher, her name is Alana and she is very nice. But then, my teacher said there was more to it, and shut the door.

Now, in our school, when a teacher shuts the door, we know this means business. So we all shushed up and said under our breath, "Uh-oh."

Our teacher said this new girl had a disease called cerebral palsy (se-ree-brul pawl-sey), or CP, and that we had to be extra patient with her.

The second she said this, my teacher was interrupted with a couple of "What's that?" questions. She explained that CP is a disease that someone has from birth, a disease that can make the person walk funny.

For us kids, this wasn't enough information... and it certainly wasn't enough for a Times article!

Not only did we want to know more about this "disease" or "disorder," we wanted to know how to cope with it. We are VERY impatient 7th graders. Our teacher told us we could look up cerebral palsy on the internet in our classroom, and I hopped right to it.

According to Ask.com, cerebral palsy can also cause a small bit of brain damage! This scared our class, actually. I went straight to Google for more. Next thing you know, I found the perfect website.

This site told us all about how we should treat a kid with CP. According to the site, kids with CP really aren't different from other kids; they just have challenges that make everyday life harder for them.

The most important thing to these kids is to fit in, which is definitely going to come into place when Alana comes to our class full-time next week!

This website says that if you know someone with CP (like I'm going to), you need to be very patient with them. Sometimes it may take them longer to say something, and of course they will look "funny" when they walk.

My class did, of course, meet her later that day. Actually, if my teacher hadn't tell us about her disorder I would never have written this article, because I would've never noticed it! Alana is very pretty (so of course the boys in my class are excited), and she talks like any of us would. According to my teacher, her locker is going to be 4 or 5 away from mine, and my friends and I can't wait to get to know her.

My class and I learned today that judging someone is wrong. Before she arrived, there was definitely small whispers of, "I wonder if she's ugly..." and "How slow are we going to have to talk?" but now we know that whether someone has a disorder or not, they can be a great person.

Off to send an instant message to Alana (because yes, she can do that!),
Mareb428