and even a Deaf mentor. We celebrated any indication that Dylan could see.
Dylan was 1 year old when I learned about the
vision and hearing loss in deafblindness being
multiplicative rather than additive. Let's see. If
the impact of Dylan's hearing loss on a scale of 1
to 10 with 10 being most severe was a 10 and the
impact of his vision loss an 8, that equaled 80
rather than 18. I was stunned by the difference. I
realized then that we could still celebrate what vision Dylan had, in fact we would have to work to
maximize it, but I knew it was not enough to compensate for the hearing loss. I also realized if 8 +
10 did not equal the degree of combined impact,
then Deaf education plus low-vision education
would not be enough to address that impact. Dylan was deafblind and needed the strategies that
come out of the unique educational field of deafblindness to have that connection and learning
we wanted. It was then that I began to study and
work in the field of deafblindness.
The Box of Deafblindness™ (Lauger, 2004)
I have to admit that as a parent, Deafblind was a
pretty scary word. It conjured up this image of
Dylan totally Deaf and blind, locked in a dark box,
alone and unreachable. How was I going to communicate with him, to know him, to teach
him???? How was he going to know me?
As a teacher I would imagine it would be the
same. I can picture a teacher looking through the
student's file and thinking to them self, "How am I
going to know this student? How am I going to
teach him?"
Fortunately, by the time I heard the term deafblind, I already "knew" Dylan in the way all
mother's get to know their babies – without words
– so was able to quickly let go of that image. In-
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