User blog comment:Paul.rea/Teen Wolf News 081314/@comment-74.206.92.61-20140904222234/@comment-174.109.212.188-20141018174449

Sorry, I know this a response to an older post, but I just had to point out that I agree with you here. No matter how Teen Wolf spins it, it's fundamentally illogical to expect Malia to function on the same educational level as the rest of her peers. She's missed at least six, if not seven, years of classes, all of which are the foundation for a high school education.

No offense to Paul, but I think he is misrepresenting the idea of "mainstreaming" in education. Check out the very link on it that he cites. Nowhere does it state that the idea behind mainstreaming is for a special-education student to either "sink or swim." It very clearly states that mainstreaming is placing a special-education student in some of the same classes as regular-education students in COMBINATION with special-education classes based on their skills. It's not merely throwing a special-education student into every class with regular-education students and hoping the special-education student catches up (which is the scenario that Teen Wolf seems to be promoting). Mainstreaming involves supplementing a special education with some regular-education classes in order to help the special-education student better integrate with the rest of the students. How many regular-education classes a special-education student takes is dependent upon his or her skills and performance level.

The very link Paul provides states that schools who perform mainstreaming still believe that a special-education student, for the most part, still requires a special education environment. There is not the expectation that a special-education student should be performing on the same level as a regular-education student. It's illogical for the educators at Beacon Hills to expect Malia to function in all the same classes at the very same level as her peers, especially if they are indeed "mainstreaming" her. And all of that aside, if it were the case that they are "mainstreaming" her, all the teachers would be aware of this and would not be publicly shaming her on her poor performance.

On top of this, Teen Wolf has now also established that it has no idea what its own timeline is for Malia. They've arbitrarily aged her but have apparently displaced her in time in order to give her that arbitrary age. This is, coupled with the way they've handled Malia's development and integration, just makes it obvious that some of the writers and the production team don't care and/or aren't even trying anymore, which is sad.