Winter 2012
Dear Louis, I was misguided for so much of my
youth about blindness and about braille. First, I thought that if I could see, even a little bit, I wasn't "really blind." Most of my teachers and all of the Caroline County, MD, public school administrators thought the same thing.
That's why they insisted that I use print, and
that's why they couldn't figure out how to teach me geometry or physics, and that's why I spent so much time on homework.
And that's why I gave up on piano lessons,
which I loved, when I couldn't read the music in the Grade Three John Thompson music book, and also why, two years later, I went off to college without any useable blindness skills at all!
In college, Louis, I went crazy trying to keep up = 30 CONTENTS
with the reading load. Then I discovered that I could hire people to read aloud to me. And when I signed up for books from Recording for the Blind (now Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic)* things got better. Even so, I had to change my intended major from Spanish and stopped at Spanish III because I couldn't read the print in the advanced Spanish textbooks. Imagine how much happier I might have
* Since the time this article was originally published on the World Wide Web, Recordings for the Blind & Dyslexic changed its name to Learning Ally.
