school

Continued from Growing Up Blind

One funny story: when my brother and I were very young, he was in a high chair; my brother threw cherrios at me. I know he was only around one at the time but still, to paraphrase what Rodney Dangerfield said, no respect, I get no respect.

In the elementary grades, K thru 5, I had an aide, actually two that I recall. I would put their names because they were very nice but I don’t know how to spell their names. They helped carry around all the paraphernalia that one needed before the era of laptops, Kurzweil and talking books. As I said, the books were Huge. Unfortunately, I don’t have any examples to photograph and show. They were often left in the classroom because they couldn’t be put in a normal backpack and you built arm strength if you did have to carry them. The books may have been able to stay in their classrooms but the slant boards weren’t necessarily able to. Some of them weren’t that heavy but others were very heavy. I can’t really describe them and I don’t have any left to take pictures of.

In these grades I could basically memorize all the material for tests and other work but the aides helped there if I needed it. I used special paper, white paper with black lines, for writing. Writing was always difficult for me; the reason being that I had to have my nose practically on top of the paper to be able to see what I was doing. At first the lines were widely spaced so I could fit my large letters on it. Gradually, as I began to write smaller, the paper got smaller so my writing wouldn’t get larger again. I truly hated to handwrite stuff but when I was growing up computers were just coming online. I did type whatever I could and that was accepted.

My 2nd grade teacher, a very nice woman, who I’m still in contact with, introduced me to The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. They are a series of seven books about some children’s adventures in the magical world of Narnia. My mother used to read them to Mark and I over and over again. If you can believe it, at one time Narnia actually was my favorite book series but it got supplanted forever by the Lord of the Rings. I eventually obtained all 7 Narnia books from Audible. I still have our original print editions, they’re not in very good condition but that’s because they were read so much. Buenas Tardes