And Zen What

Dear Teacher at the Blind and Visually Impaired School,

Thank you for your recent letter. I so very much appreciate your obvious affection for and investment in Five. I'd like to talk a bit, as I did with the teacher last year, about your statement that it's hard for Five to learn Braille as he is "such a visual learner."

It’s perfectly understandable that Five presents as a “visual learner.”

The proposition that people have different learning “styles” (visual, kinetic, etc) has “legs,” as it were: it’s proven useful to countless teachers and students. As a pedagogical hypothesis it is a singularly hardy and broadly applicable one.

But in Five's circumstances, the hypothesis that he is a visual learner based on his observable behavior presents a problem. The problem is two-fold:

1. Five is not “visual” enough to live a full, independent adult life—one that is commensurate, that is, with his considerable gifts and capabilities. Yes, he could work in a call center with huge 48+ pt font on his computer with auditory support. But only being unable to read swiftly and fluently in Braille would put him in a job like that. Five is, as you say, exceptionally intelligent and personable. He's a math whiz. These are gifts; he should learn that his gifts can outweigh by far his disability.

2. His formative years were spent in an environment where being disabled was literally shameful and undesirable. He LEARNED to be a “visual learner” and still has deep shame about not being able to be as sighted as the "normal" population. You have to trust me on this shame issue: he's not going to express it directly at school; it will probably come out in frustration behaviors, dawdling, fidgeting, etc, which is how he expresses resistance and negativity at home.

He is at your school because I want him to be not merely proficient but expert at so-called “blind skills.” I don’t know what the future will hold for him (will his vision get worse? Well, I know it won’t get better. Will technology “save” him? I hope so, but who knows).

He may be a visual learner. Or he may long to be a more visual learner and therefore with the immense determination and adaptable intelligence we have all seen so much of, he may have meticulously taught himself to look like one. He may never lose the sense that any other approach to life and learning is “second rate” or worse, but he has to live in his body and in the world he makes for himself.

It’s not exactly analogous, but sometimes I think about how left-handed people used to be trained to be right-handed. When it was ok for them to try to revert, were they able to do it? Were they somehow always ashamed of their left-handedness?

Five is a challenge not only at school and home; he is a challenge to himself. You and your colleagues can help him enormously not only with his education, with opening out the world for him far beyond “sheltered” work environments, but also with the even more important mission of self-acceptance.

I know this is your vision for him too. Let's work together and make it a visible goal for him as well.