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Is
Your Child Age Appropriate?
by
Ruby Ryles
Reprinted from the Braille Monitor
I
live in the Seattle, Washington, area; and I am a professional
in the education of blind children. I've been the Arkansas
State Vision Consultant, coordinating and developing
statewide programs for blind and visually impaired children.
My staff and I worked out of the Arkansas School for
the Blind in conjunction with the State Department of
Education of Arkansas. I spent a number of years as
an itinerant teacher for the blind in Anchorage, Alaska.
Recently
I developed and currently supervise a program for blind
and visually impaired children in the Bellingham, Washington
School District. I also do private contracting with
various school districts in Northwest Washington to
assist in meeting the needs of their visually impaired
student populations. I have a bachelor's, a master's,
a year and a half of postmaster's study; and I am currently
a full-time Ph.D. student at the University of Washington
in the area of special education, doing educational
research on the blind. Are you impressed? Could I intimidate
you at an IEP meeting? I certainly must qualify as a
major-league expert regarding your blind child; don't
you agree? As the kids would say, "Not!" Or, more correctly
stated, "Wrong!" Well, if a hot-dog professional, who
has read a ton of textbooks and taken and taught innumerable
classes isn't the authority on your blind child's abilities
and potentials, just who is? You are, my friends. You
may not know or use the jargon of the professionals,
but you truly do have the expertise regarding your child.
Some of you parents do not quite believe me, do you?
Well,
let me run over your areas of expertise, using the special
education terminology of the day. When your blind baby
began saying, "Bye bye," did you teach her to say, "Bye
bye, Dada"? If so, then you assessed her proximal zone
of linguistic development, scaffolded, and became her
first communication development specialist. Did you
hold on to your year-old baby's fingers and walk and
walk and walk barefoot across the living room rug to
encourage him to walk alone? Then you probably blatantly
defied the Domon-Delacoto theory and became your child's
initial peripatologist. Did you wrestle with your child
on the bed, stack blocks, roll balls, play on the slides
and swings, and guide your child as he or she put on
socks and zipped a coat or loosened a lid on a jar?
Then you're as accomplished in small and gross motoric
guidance and ADL skills as any occupational or physical
therapist I've worked with.
Do
you remember the time you used a stern, disapproving
voice and sat your child in a chair for ten minutes
to settle him down or sent him to his room because he
sassed his grandmother or tore the arm off his sister's
Barbie doll or pitched a fit at Safeway? Did you know
that you were assessing his current level of behavioral,
social, and emotional functioning and applying behavior
modification techniques to ensure the appropriate attitudinal
adjustment of a non-compliant, temporarily behaviorally-disordered
child? I don't know about you, my friends, but my own
service delivery model of behavior modification when
my blind son Dan was little was expedient, efficient,
and measurable, especially when it was administered
to the seat of his pants. Parents are cognition and
behavior specialists long before any psychologist ever
puts our blind child's name on paperwork or assigns
him a score on any test. You are the expert.
You
don't use the jargon, and my apologies for the pompous
introduction. My point is not to be silly, but to stress
the fact that education, specifically special education,
is glued together with jargon. I really think that special
education would come apart at the seams if we didn't
use jargon, especially if professionals had to say in
real language who they are and what they do. Don't be
too impressed or intimidated by titles and degrees or
jargon in special education because there is no one
and no test ever devised that knows your child as well
as you do. Believe in your child's abilities. If you
don't, there is no one who will. Any professional who
makes you feel less knowledgeable about your child is
poorly trained, insecure, arrogant, or all of the above.
We've
established the point now that you're an expert in your
child's behavioral, emotional, physical, and social
development. Well, how about academics? You heard Fred
Schroeder speak about this earlier today. Are you just
going to have to trust that the special education department
in your school district will do the right thing? No.
Listen up, because after the next few minutes, you as
a parent will be able to assess your child's academic
progress and design a program that will take him through
his public school years. Pay close attention now, because
this information draws the line between a real expert
on blind children and someone with only degrees and
titles and pompous introductions to recommend him or
her. There are only two words. Write them down on a
scratch pad or a piece of scrap paper, but I want you
to carry them in your heart for the rest of your son's
or daughter's childhoodage appropriate. That's
it, and it's a hundred percent, guaranteed, foolproof,
surefire, can't-be-denied secret. The majority of professionals
in our field don't know it or practice it or, sadly
enough, believe it. But you now know the secret of success
for your blind child; and I want you to feel it and
live it.
Let's
talk about these two empowering words. Very simply,
"age-appropriate" just means that your child is doing
the things at the same age as he or she would have done
them as a sighted child. For instance, what is a six-
or seven-month-old child doing? Sitting up. That's one
thing. Okay, there is no reason at all that a blind
child shouldn't be sitting up at six months. At twelve
months, what's the age-appropriate thing a child should
be doing? One thing is walking. There is no reason not
to expect it, even though we are told quite often by
mobility instructors that blind kids don't walk until
twenty-four months. In my own experience, that's just
not soI do have a number of years of experience
with blind kids and have raised a blind son. He walked
at twelve months. A number of times I have had people
point to research that blind kids don't walk until twenty-four
months. Well then, how do we explain all the kids that
do walk earlier?
At
two and a half years old, sighted babies are into everything.
Our blind infants ought to be into everything too. If
they are not, you need to teach them. Teach them to
get into the cabinets and what fun it is to find the
pots and pans and to bang them together and make noise
that will drive you crazy: all of the things that we
say, "No, no, no" about to a two-and-a-half-year-old.
If somebody tells you that your two-and-a-half-year-old
is such a good baby, you better get scared, because
your baby is not age-appropriate. If he is not age-appropriate
at two and a half, then when is he going to be? When
is he going to find the pots and pans and get into them?
When he is twelve? That is not age-appropriate.
BehaviorI
often find that I can tell as much about kids by their
misbehavior as I can by their behavior. I think it was
a real good lesson to me as a mom to watch my own son's
misbehavior at age-appropriate levels. I had a student
one time who was a third grader and I suppose is now
a tenth grader. Kids in Alaska keep their boots in the
closet, and they put on tennis shoes when they come
to school. At the end of the day you change back into
your snow boots. He was looking around for his snow
boots, and somebody stepped on his hand. That was not
pleasant, and he turned around and bit the kid. When
I came in the next day, there was a big hullabaloo about
this. I said, "Randy, you are in big-time trouble with
the school for biting. If you are going to get in trouble
for misbehaving, I would prefer to see you do it like
an eight-year-old rather than a three-year-old. The
next time somebody steps on your hand in the closet
and you get angry about it, haul off and slug him; don't
bite him." That's age-appropriate for an eight-year-old.
My point is that, if Randy was going to get into trouble,
how much more appropriate to do it as an eight-year-old.
I
have a sadder comment to make on the lack of age-appropriate
behavior. I had a student one timeshe was probably
in the eleventh grade. Somebody in class had called
her a name that was none too pleasant, and she responded
as an eight-year-old; she hit the girl. Now when I got
to this high school, the counselor said that the teachers
had already handled the situation. After I sifted through
all that was happening, I found out that nobody had
done much of anything about it. I asked, "Wait, why
has no one done anything about this misbehavior? What
would you do to a sighted eleventh-grader who hit somebody
in the mouth?" "We would expel her."
She
was never expelled; she was never even disciplined.
Two years later, as she was transitioning into a job
with the Anchorage Power and Light Company, she slammed
a door on her supervisor's hand, not by accident, but
out of anger, acting more like an eight-year-old than
an eighteen-year-old. Obviously, Anchorage Power and
Light was not real interested in retaining her services.
Age-appropriate
behaviorit's very important. If the child is not
appropriate at eight years old, when is he going to
be an eight-year-old? When he is eighteen?
Languageone
thing that needs to be understood is that blindness
is in no way a cognitive handicap; it's just not. There
is no earthly reason why our kids should not be on level
developmentally. The only thing that holds them back
in all these areas, whether it is language, behavior,
academics, or anything else, is our own expectationsour
own as parents and as professionals.
I
ran across some interesting research recently. Unfortunately
it was done outside the United States. Much of our research
is rather negative. Fortunately, if you go to other
countries to look for research, there is much better
data on blind kids. One of the articles I looked at
was talking about language and blind kids. The sample
they studied indicated that blind kids' language acquisition
and development were right on target with that of sighted
kids, whereas the research in the United States says
no such thing. I thought that was rather interesting.
In
my own experience I find that blind kids whose parents
work with them show no difference in language acquisition
from sighted kids. Echolalia is a term often used by
professionals to describe blind infants. It's parroting.
If you say to your child, "Jennifer, do you want a cookie?"
and Jennifer says, "Jennifer, do you want a cookie?"
but she means, "I want a cookie," there is nothing abnormal
about that. All normally developing kids (sighted or
blind) go through an echolalic period. You don't need
a speech or language therapist; all you do is model
to the child the answer that you want her to give you.
Quickly Jennifer will pick it up. Instead of saying,
"Jennifer, do you want a cookie?" when she wants a cookie,
she will say "Yes" or "Yes, please" or whatever it is
in your familynot hard.
Dressingat
twelve years old one of my students was not washing
or combing his own hair and was not clipping his nails.
Again, if he doesn't do it at twelve, at what age? How
inappropriate that at sixteen, he is just beginning
to learn to wash his own hair. If as a parent you're
not sure what is age appropriate, in other words, if
you have a six-year-old and you're not sure what a six-year-old
does because it's your only child, take a look around
the neighborhood or at church. Look at other six-year-olds,
and see what they are doing. There have to be other
six-year-olds in your family. As a last resort go out
and buy a book: Dr. Spock. Don't buy a book on blindness;
buy one on standard development in children.
Eating skillswe can run the whole gamut with this
one. But there is no reason in any area that your child
shouldn't be doing what she would if she were sighted.
A lot of people get very poor advice from professionals
about such things as saving a fork until the child is
five or six years old. But this means that by the time
he gets to school he has had very little experience
in using a fork; and, believe me, the rest of the kids
in that cafeteria will pick up real quickly that your
child is the only one consistently bringing a sack lunch
with finger foods, that he doesn't ever get a hot lunch
where he has to use a fork and a spoon and a knife.
If you don't think that doesn't isolate your child,
you are wrong. It does.
Is
your child limited in getting around in any way? For
instance, mobility? This organization (NOPBC) was at
the leading edge in insisting on mobility for preschool
kids and using canes. I can remember very vividly, five
or six years ago, this organization was already fighting
very hard to get the word out that young children need
canes so they can learn what they need to know early.
The blindness field was saying, "No, we need to give
them canes for a thirty-minute mobility lesson at school
and then take them away." You can equate that with giving
a pencil to a three-year-old sighted child. Would you
deny preschoolers pencils until they get to school and
then hand them out for thirty minutes at a writing lesson?
How good do you think they are going to be at handwriting
if that's the only experience they have with a pencil?
And a sighted person uses a pencil far less than the
blind child uses the cane.
Role
modelsin our family and with the kids that I teach,
we have a cardinal rule that, if you don't know how
to do something, don't go ask the professionals. You
ask the real expertthe blind person who is doing
it. For instance, I had a tenth- or eleventh-grade blind
kid in Anchorage. He wanted to take a class on small
engines, working on airplane engines. I know absolutely
nothing about that. When I was in school as a girl,
shop was for boys. So the first time I stepped into
a shop class, I felt like I was in a locker room or
something. I had no idea how Joe was going to take this
classI didn't know the names of the tools. I had
no idea how they could be adapted. It would have been
foolish for me to dream up some way for him to adapt
these things. So I called the fellow who was President
of the National Federation of the Blind, and I said,
"Do you know a blind mechanic?" I didn't even call the
guy myself. The President gave me the number, and the
school district paid for the call so Joe could make
the call. And the result was that Joe took the class
without much help from me. He didn't need it anymore,
because he had the real expertise he needed. He had
learned from the blind mechanic about the set of tools
he needed. We then got together with the Lions Club
and bought it.
When
my son was eleven or twelve, he wanted to do a paper
route. Despite all of my professional expertise and
wisdom, I had no idea how he could do one. At the time
Jim Gashel was in our city. It really took a lot of
courage on my part as a parent, but I swallowed my pride,
went up to him, and said, "Mr. Gashel, I understand
that you had a paper route when you were a boy, and
I want to know how you did it. My son wants to have
a paper route. Did you go on your mother's arm?" (I
thought he was going to gag on that idea.) He said,
"Well, no, but I don't remember how I did it. Does your
son know how to use landmarks with his cane?"
"I
don't know."
He
asked, "How does he get home from school?"
"He
gets off the bus and walks about a block and a half
to the house."
He
said, "Then he has to be able to use landmarks."
I
still can't tell you how Dan did that paper route. This
was in Alaska with snow up to your knees. We just started
out one morning as you would with a sighted child. I
had the route list. If you have ever had a sighted kid
with a paper route, you know that as a mom you normally
begin the route with the kid. You say, "Okay, 2113,
that's the brown house on the right over there. Let's
see, 2115, that's the house next to it. 2116, oh, that's
across the street. And normally you go over the list
with the kid for a few days. You know, that's all I
did with Dan, and within six or seven days he was doing
it alone. However he figured it out with his cane, he
was doing the route on his own.
That
is the way he has always made his spending money. He
delivers papers for the Seattle Times still. He handles
his own records. We never have to do anything to help
him. In fact, he had to train two substitutes to take
his route so that he could be here at the convention.
We went to the Federation; we went to the real experts.
The people that I work with professionally were kind
of upset that we didn't make mobility lessons out of
learning how to do a paper route. But look at the message
that would have given Dan: You have to have a series
of lessons in being normal.
When
he was in the tenth grade, Dan wanted to be in the marching
band at school. Again I had no idea how to help. This
is a good marching band. Our high school has won state
awards, and they are not about to let anybody in who
will mess up their precision drills. I had no idea how
he could do it, because he uses his cane all the time,
and you can't use the cane during drills. Before I could
think of contriving some kind of an adaptation, Dan
got on the phone, called the National Center for the
Blind, and said, "Let me speak to anybody who's blind
and who has been in a marching band." He happened to
get hooked up with Pat Maurer. The next thing I knewand
I didn't have anything to do with this at allhe
talked to the band director, and the two of them worked
it out to the point where the last time I went to one
of his football games where the band was marching at
half time, I videotaped it. When I got home, I was informed
that the kid that I had the camera on was not even Dan.
You couldn't find him. Dan was very pleased with that
because he didn't stand out, and I was irritated because
I wanted a tape of his marching.
Staying
on the topic of schoolkindergarten. You need to
learn about the kindergarten curriculum. They're called
specific learning objectives (SLO's), and every school
district has them for each grade. These are the things
that we expect the kids to know when they come out of
each grade. Kindergarten is pretty basic, pretty easy.
Children need to know the alphabet. Your child needs
to know it in Braille; that's all there is to it. Numbers,
children need to be able to count. Normally in kindergarten
they are supposed to be able to count at least to a
hundred. Your child needs to be able to do it too. You
should be able to demand it; you must demand it from
your school district. I don't care how it's done, whether
they use Mangold, whether they do it with Patterns.
Because
I taught first grade for about nine years before I got
into this field, I like to use basal readers. I take
a basal reader and adapt my own method. It doesn't matter
how it's done, as long as the child is on level from
kindergarten through high school. In kindergarten the
kids need to know colors. Blind kids need to know colors
too. Totally blind children need to know dogs are not
blue, hair is not green unless someone's making a statement.
Animalshow
inappropriate for a fourteen-year-old not to know about
animals! It's very embarrassing for students at fourteen
and fifteen and sixteen. Sometimes, after they begin
to feel comfortable with me, my students say things
that let me know that they have no concept of a bird,
different wingspans, a bird's feet. We talk about animals'
feet. We look at the difference between a cat's feet,
goat's feet, bird's feet, cow's feet. How about tails
on animals? Will your child ever have a good concept
of a giraffe? You say, "Oh my, of course not." Well
sure he will if you describe it by analogy. He's got
to know something about what a giraffe's feet are like.
Are they more like a goat's, a cow's, or a horse's feet?
But first he's got to have a good concept of the animals
that you can let him have hands-on experiences with.
Do this at an age-appropriate timethree, four,
and five years oldso that you can talk to him
about animals. A giraffe has a tail that's much like
a cow's tail, but how will he know if he doesn't know
what a cow's tail is like, if you have not taken him
to a fair?
We
are city people, so when a fair came around, I used
to grab the opportunity. If you go into the animal barns,
the people always want to let your kid pet the animals.
That's not going to give the child much of a concept
of what that animal is like. I always say we need to
get into the animal. I take the child's hands and together
we feel the back leg of a dog or a cat or a cow to know
what the animal's legs are like and how they differ
from the front legs and how the legs bend. So when I
talk about the legs on a giraffe, the child will have
a concept of that. But it is much harder to do this
when the child is twelve than it is when he is five.
Remember,
when your child is in first grade (Fred Schroeder mentioned
this earlier, and it can't be emphasized too much),
your child is not learning Braille; your child is learning
to read in Braille. It boils down to this: when your
child is leaving first grade, he needs to be reading
at a beginning second grade reading level, or he is
behind. It is like dominoes. He's behind in first grade.
That throws second grade behind. He's behind in second
grade, and that gap gets wider and wider and wider.
Don't kid yourself: your child is not going to catch
up. You need to be sure now that your child is on level
in first grade.
At
three years old every child should be using a spoon;
don't wait until your child is six. Don't let somebody
tell you that it's normal for a blind child not to do
something until later. That's not so! Beware of the
word "realistic." Anybody that tells you to be realistic
about your child, you know what that really means? Lower
your expectations. It means don't expect so much, accept
less. That's what it means, and you should get your
back up.
Second
grade is the time for teaching keyboardingI don't
like that term; it's still typing to me. A child needs
to learn to type. All vision-impaired kids (low-vision
and Braille-reading kids) need to learn to type because
they are going to be communicating with print-reading
teachers.
I've
been criticized sometimes for waiting too long, but
third grade is normally the grade that I introduce slate
and stylus. I would wait no longer than that. Writing
with the slate and stylus is one of the easiest things
under the sun to introduce to a child. I wait till third
grade simply because by this time normally they've got
a pretty good grasp of Braille, and it takes about six
weeks from introduction to the time when they're just
about fast enough to keep up with the spelling tests.
I like to say, "Okay, spelling is the first subject
in which we are going to use the slate and stylus. You
are expected to do your spelling totally with slate
and stylus." I have to prime the teacher first to let
her know that she is not to slow down in dictating the
Wednesday preliminary spelling test for this child.
He may be used to making A's in spelling. He may make
an F or so in spelling because he is not keeping up,
but the teacher is not to slow down. There is nothing
that will make that child speed up faster than a poor
grade on his spelling test because he couldn't keep
up. As a parent you need to get onto your child at home
and say, "Hey, what happened to this spelling?" even
though you know. If you accept the low score on the
grounds that, well he was using the slate and stylus,
so he's going to be a little slower at this, what message
does that send to your child? It's okay if I'm not up
to snuff in writing and spelling.
I would say, be very wary of putting an aide in a classroom
with your child because an aide takes away independence.
Think about it. If you've got an aide in the classroom
with your child, at what point are you going to say,
"Okay, no more aides in that classroom?" At sixth grade,
fifth grade, when? Are you planning for it now? If your
child has an aide in kindergarten or first grade, are
you planning that next year we are going to say, no
aide: she is going to do it on her own.
Dan
hasn't even had an IEP since he was in seventh grade.
He graduated from high school two weeks ago today. It
has not been real easy along the way. The hardest thing
I think has been for me to sit on my hands and not go
to that school and wring some people's necks. I had
to teach Dan to do his own advocating with the teachers.
The science teacher, for instance, gave Dan a C, and
in looking at the final report I noticed that they had
included a computer printout record of the stuff the
kids had done. Dan had done twenty-five percent of what
the rest of the kids had done that quarter. I said,
"Dan, do you realize you've done twenty-five percent,
and the teacher is giving you a C? The teacher had written
at the bottom that it was too visual. They had been
doing a unit on astronomy, and they were computing distances
between stars and that sort of stuff. It was beyond
me, to be honest with you.
Anyway,
I impressed on Dan that next year builds on this. You
have twenty-five percent of the knowledge out of this
science class that you are going to need for next year.
Are you really satisfied with that? He went back to
the teacher and said he wanted the extra work. He wanted
the seventy-five percent that he had missed. He got
it; he also got a lower grade on his behavior. I think
his teacher thought he was a smart aleck, coming back
and asking for the extra work. But he did the work and
it taught him a lesson: he should not be letting his
teacher make these decisions for him.
Often
our kids have assignments cut for them. We are told
that they work too slowly, for instance. It takes so
much longer for them to get the assignment done. But
what does this say to our kids? For one thing, they
are being permissioned out of an education. Many times
especially kids who are partially sighted and who don't
know Braille are excused right into incompetence. If
your child is partially sighted, there is no getting
around it: he needs to learn Braille, which he can learn
along with print. I would not advocate that he read
only Braille, but he needs to learn to use print when
it is efficient and Braille when it is efficient. It
is far, far easier for your child to be taught Braille
when he is six rather than twelve, because once kids
get to about third grade, they are going to fight anything
that is different. It is normal that they do. But I
don't think that I have ever had a child, partially
sighted or blind, below the third grade level who has
ever resisted learning Braille.
Extra
timeoften our kids are given extended time limits,
and the only reason they have extra time, whether they're
Braille or low vision kids who haven't learned Braille,
is that we haven't expected enough of them. If they
are low vision and they need extra time, they need Braille.
If they are Braille kids and they need extra time, they're
not reading fast enough. That's all there is to it.
And we need to step up their Braille reading instruction
to be sure that they learn to read fast enough. There
is no reason for our kids to need extra time.
Extra
time in getting to class, extra time in getting to lunchthis
should not be happening. As Fred said earlier about
the kids who left five minutes early to get to the swings
at recess, the message that policy sends to the child
is very harmful.
How
do you know if your child will benefit from reading
Braille? If your child has low vision, There are some
red flags that you can think about. If your child has
low vision, does he enjoy reading? Does he pick up a
library book and read it for pleasure? Normally notlow-vision
kids avoid reading. As a partially sighted adult once
said to me, "Reading print is just not pleasurable."
There is no such thing as pleasure reading for these
kids. Does your child use tapes a lot because print
is so tiring? Does he need to have someone read the
printed material to him? Your child is not going to
learn reading skills if he doesn't read. He has to read
a large amount of material. Somewhere, in some of the
readings that I have done in the last year or so, I
have read that the average fifth-grade child runs across
a million words a year. Do you think your partially
sighted child using tapes is going to see that number?
To be able to be literate, our children must physically
read the same amount of material as sighted kids. For
instance, is your partially-sighted child spelling as
well as she should be? How is her reading speed? If
it is not up to snuff, you need to be looking at Braille.
Does
a child use tapes for book reports? Teachers assign
book reports because they want the child to have the
experience of reading books, and tapes don't provide
the full experience. Kids can't learn to spell words
off tapes. For instance, one of the students I had recently
was a junior in high school, and she had just learned
Braille. She was reading and saw a phrase in the text.
She said, "This morningI didn't know that was
two words." If you get your information from tapes,
there is no way that you could catch such a simple thing
as that, let alone being able to spell a word like "Chicago."
There is no way unless you have read the word "Chicago"
enough times that you would know that it is not spelled
with a "S-h-i-k." Be sure that your child is reading
a lot.
Written
expression is another big red flag with partially-sighted
kids. Punctuation, paragraphing, syntax: all suffer
greatly if the child doesn't read. Kids who don't read
can't write. Braille is the answer.
Handwritingcan
your child read his own handwriting after it gets cold?
For instance, after a couple of weeks could you pull
out notes from your partially sighted seventh-grader's
notebook and say, "Read this back to me." If he can't
read it, seriously consider Braille, because your child
could benefit from learning it.
When
I am called to assess a child in junior high, I know
what I am going to find. The school personnel will say
they want me to come look at a child that is visually
impaired. Probably the student is in a resource room,
some kind of a self-contained setting for at least one
period a day. An aide or someone else is helping the
child, more or less pulling her through assignmentsreading
the material, helping with spelling. These kids are
not getting through school on their own. They are not
getting the literacy skills that they need at all. Most
of them are permissioned out of a lot of basic courses,
such as foreign language, geometry, and higher math,
because teachers believe these courses are too visual
for kids with limited sight. Braille kids aren't denied
such opportunities. For instance, last year my son Dan
took trigonometry and chemistry. He needed no aides
to take these classes. It's not that Dan or my other
students are brilliant. It's just that they learned
Braille from early on, and they took it for granted
that they were expected to do higher math. They were
expected to take trigonometry and geometry and two years
of Spanish or French or German. Good Braille readers
can do that. Those who struggle through with print can't.
Such students are not normally good enough readers to
handle complex material.
I
lost my glasses earlier this week, and with my university
courses, I've got to do a lot of reading. I got migraine
headaches Monday and Tuesday. I'm taking a statistics
class right now, and the eye strain gave me migraine
headaches. I finally told my husband I couldn't go on.
I was either going to have to start using Braille or
go get some glasses. That experience gave me real empathy
with a lot of the kids I have taught and am thankful
for, the low-vision kids to whom I have taught Braille.
Reading print is just not pleasurable for them, and
they don't do enough of it to be very literate. Your
kids won't be either, if they are partially sighted.
Teach them Braille.
One
definition of literacy is the ability to read and write
at grade level. If your child is a Braille reader and
she is in third grade and you don't know whether she
is reading on level, how do you tell? Ask to borrow
a third-grade textbook in your child's class. If it's
not in Braille, there is somebody in your community
who knows Braille well enough to Braille a story in
the middle. Hand it to your child and listen to how
she reads. See if she is fluent with it. If she is,
ask her some questions about what she has just read.
How is her comprehension? You can tell whether she is
stumbling all over herself in answering your questions.
If she has no idea what she has read, she is not on
grade level. I don't care what that IEP says, what the
assessment says; you do your own assessment of your
child. It's not that hard.
I
will finish by saying that in the Federation we believe
that blindness can be reduced to the level of a nuisance
if you've got the skills and opportunity. Can blindness
really be reduced to the level of a nuisance? You bet
it can, but only if your kid has good skills, a positive
attitude about blindness, and a chance. One day soon,
parents, you will find yourself in my shoes. Your child
will be taller than you are, standing on the threshold
of adulthood. I'll tell you from experience, it will
be here in the blink of an eye. It seems like yesterday
that Dan was a little one in my arms, and he is starting
at Washington State University this fall. I can't believe
the time is here. Time is a vindictive, relentless thief,
and the cruelest theft of all is the theft of our kids'
confidence in themselves. Don't let another day go by
before you see that your child has the skills to ensure
that he can become a confident, independent adult. You
do that by seeing that he is a confident, independent
child. See that he's age-appropriate in every way.
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