By Sheila Koenig

(Editor’s Note:  Sheila is a 9th grade English teacher at South View Middle School in Edina.  She is also First Vice-President of our Metro Chapter and a newly elected member of the NFB of Minnesota Board of Directors.)

During the last year at South View, we have been implementing a new system for talking with kids about behavior and choices.  Restitution is a philosophy that focuses on the kind of people we want to be.  In my class, for example, students created drawings and collages of the type of student they want to be, the type of friend they want to be, and the type of son or daughter they want to be.  So when behavior issues arise, instead of ostracizing students, we talk with them about how their choices might have been incongruent with the kind of people they want to become.  It’s a process that strengthens rather than defeats.

As I began considering my own reading history, I reflected that the image of the type of person I wanted to be was quite different as a child.  Growing up I did not consider myself blind.  I focused on the vision I had rather than the vision I lacked.  I was not taught braille.  Because I had usable vision, no one thought to teach it to me.  I believe that most of my vision teachers thought that the large print was effective; the struggles and setbacks I kept to me myself.  In classes I read large print books by dragging my nose across the pages.  I got ink spots on my nose from such close reading, and in middle school and high school, ink spots are not the coolest accessory.  I was very anxious about being called upon to read aloud in class.  I would always look ahead and count paragraphs to try to determine which one I would be reading.  I worried that I wouldn’t be able to see the words.  The more anxious I became, the more quickly my glasses steamed.  So by the time my name was called, I couldn’t see the words because of the steam on my glasses.  Flustered and ashamed, I stammered through the reading.  My junior year in high school I elected to take a Creative Writing class.  Because I was a fairly good writer, I had been looking forward to this class for some time.  However, I soon learned that all of our writing would be read aloud to the entire class.  I worked hard to memorize each piece, and I practiced laboriously.  Something, though, was always different when I stood in front of that classroom.  Perhaps the fluorescent lighting glared too harshly, or maybe the sun streamed through the window at an unusual angle.  I struggled through each piece I read.  The real embarrassment is that I could write well, but I doubt many of my classmates know that because of how I read the words.

I met blind people for the first time when I won a scholarship from the National Federation of the Blind of Wisconsin when I graduated from high school.  I saw that these blind people had successful careers and full lives. Despite seeing these things, I still felt separate.  Good for them, I thought.  But it has nothing to do with me.  It wasn’t until the semester before I began student teaching that I reconsidered the image of the person I wanted to become.  Myriads of questions spun through my mind.  How would I take attendance or read notes for my lessons?  What would my 14-year old students think of their teacher holding papers up to her face in order to read them?  The person I had wanted to be was professional, competent, confident, and successful.  I struggled to fit together the images of who I was and who I wanted to become.  I slowly began to understand that braille was the key.

The summer before I student taught, I attended Blindness: Learning in New Dimensions (BLIND) Incorporated.  I learned the braille code and practiced reading and writing.  During my time at BLIND Incorporated, I began to think of myself as blind.  Surrounded by capable and confident blind teachers, I realized that I could become the competent, successful person I had always wanted to be.

I have been teaching now for nearly ten years, and braille is a vital part of my career.  My seating charts are in braille, and students see from the first day that I am a braille reader.  They excitedly ask, “Which one am I?” as their fingers run across the page.  I use braille for PowerPoint notes.  For example, this past week we began reading To Kill a Mockingbird.  On a separate sheet of paper students labeled sections as “characters”, “setting”, “problems,” and “outcomes”.  With the projector remote in one hand and my brailled note card in the other, I flashed words like “The Trial”, “Stereotype”, “Atticus Finch”, and “Cooties” on the screen.  Since we had not yet begun reading, students guessed where the words would fit.  They find it amusing, weeks later, to review their guesses.  A few years ago I was surprised when I student approached me with a braille message scribbled on a piece of notebook paper.  He asked if I could help him decode it, and he explained that in one of the video games he plays, one must decode braille messages in order to move to the next level.  Braille can emerge in the strangest places!  I have also used braille when presenting to staff during professional development meetings.  Most recently I shared a test that I had created using Bloom’s Taxonomy, a way of asking questions at a variety of levels.  In addition to using braille at work, I use braille in my home life as well.  I can now enjoy curling up on the couch with a book, no longer worried about lighting or ink spots.

With certainty, BLIND Incorporated and the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) changed the person I have become.  In part, I believe I didn’t consider myself blind as a child because of the misconceptions and stereotypes blindness carried.  Those stereotypes were inconsistent with the person I wanted to be.  It is because of both BLIND Incorporated and the NFB that I could adjust the images and realize that even though I was blind, I could still be a competent, successful person.