ABSTRACT
Years ago, on the way back from a social event for individuals with mental retardation, the young woman I had sponsored and taken to the event shared her observations of the evening with me. She told me that she knew the other people at the dance were "retarded" like her. When I asked her how she knew, she told me that their skin felt just like hers. Marietta was about 23 years old and had an IQ of about 35. This would place her in a category of "trainable mentally retarded," an individual who could be trained for some repetitious skills and limited self-care but would not be able to think in the abstract, make accurate judgments, or engage in analogous thinking. Yet, she was able to identify characteristics of specific individuals that go beyond what her IQ and its prognosis would indicate to be within her ability. She synthesized new knowledge, transferred it, and applied it to her own understanding of the socially constructed category of mental retardation.
