                 IS YOUR CHILD AGE-APPROPRIATE?
                          by Ruby Ryles

     From the Associate Editor: Among the families of blind
children, those who work with blind people, and many blind people
themselves there is a polite conspiracy of silence about the
actual abilities of blind people. As the views and philosophy of
the National Federation of the Blind have found more and more
wide-spread acceptance or at least lip service, people in the
blindness field have learned to mouth the politically correct
phrases: "My blind twelve-year-old gets himself ready for school
independently"; "We expect our blind clients to pull their weight
in the work place"; "I can travel anywhere I want to go." All of
these are perfectly rational and appropriate statements. The
trouble is that most of the people who make them or ones like
them every day don't mean or believe them.
     Many blind people seem to think that pretending they are
independent is the nearest they will ever get to true
independence. After all, they think, deep down, everybody knows
that blind parents use their sighted children as intelligent and
literate guide dogs. Family and friends had better be prepared to
drop everything to act as chauffeur to the blind person, and no
one really expects a blind employee to carry his or her full
share of the load. Above all, and most devastating, no one
actually expects blind children to keep up academically and
socially with their sighted peers. It would be, of course, a
shocking breach of good manners to say these things out loud, but
many people (perhaps most) believe them.
     We who are members of the National Federation of the Blind,
however, do truly believe that blind people have the capacity to
live fully normal, contributing lives. In the beginning we may
only hope that this is the case, but in this organization we can
look around us and see blind people who are living proof that
this is indeed so. The blind children who are being raised by the
members of our Parents of Blind Children Division are perhaps the
most dramatic living proof of the power of the philosophy we
espouse. 
     Ruby Ryles is a leader in the Parents of Blind Children
Division and the mother of a blind son. She is also a
distinguished expert in the education of blind children. She is
currently enrolled full-time in a doctoral program at the
University of Washington and is working part-time in the program
for visually impaired students that she established in the
Bellingham, Washington, School District. She was also this year's
recipient of the National Federation of the Blind Distinguished
Educator of Blind Children Award. She addressed the Parents of
Blind Children Seminar on Sunday, June 30, 1992, in Charlotte,
North Carolina. Her remarks went straight to the heart of the
confusion about appropriate expectations for blind children. Her
expertise is unimpeachable, her words are clear, and her message
is compelling. Here is what she had to say:

     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
state-wide 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 post-
master'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 Doman-Delecato 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 paper work 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 childhood--"age appropriate." That's it, and it's a
hundred percent, guaranteed, fool-proof, sure-fire, 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 so--I 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. 
     Behavior--I 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 time--she 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 behavior--it's very important. If the child
is not age-appropriate at eight years old, when is he going to be
an eight-year-old? When he is eighteen? 
     Language--One 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 expectations--our 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 are 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 family--not hard.
     Dressing--At 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 skills--We 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 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 pre-schoolers 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 models--in 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
expert--the 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 class--I 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 knew--and I didn't have anything to
do with this at all--he 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 school--kindergarten. 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. 
     Animals--How 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 time--
three, four, and five years old--so 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 keyboarding--I 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 time--often 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
lunch--this 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 not--low-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 morning'--I 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 an "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. 
     Handwriting--can 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 who 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 assignments--
reading 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.
