Traveling Blind: Life Lessons from Unlikely Teachers - Laura Fogg

Traveling Blind: Life Lessons from Unlikely Teachers (eBook)

Laura Fogg (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2020 | 1. Auflage
210 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-0983-3380-5 (ISBN)

In her remarkable memoir, Laura Fogg shares the unique life lessons she learned from the children she has worked with as a teacher of the visually impaired; lessons on patience, hope, doubt, loss, control, judgment and, ultimately, joy. With honesty and insight, Laura relates her experiences as an itinerant teacher in beautiful, rural Mendocino County. The abundant challenges and delights in her life's work are vividly portrayed with humor and tears and each child is seen for who he is--rather than for who he is not. Traveling Blind will bring you a deeper understanding of the struggles, perils and unexpected wonders of learning to negotiate this world without vision. Laura's students reveal that blindness is a difficult and inconvenient condition, but one that does not have to rob people of their humanity, their intelligence or their zest for living. Parents, teachers, caregivers, all who love a child with a visual impair- ment or multiple handicaps, as well as those who have never even thought about blindness, will find stories that resonate in Traveling Blind.

For 35 years Laura Fogg has worked with blind children and their families, traveling throughout beautiful and sometimes treacherous Mendocino County, using her car as an office and her abundant creativity as her main teaching tool. In her remarkable memoir, Traveling Blind: Life Lessons from Unlikely Teachers, Fogg describes the challenges and delights in her life's work while portraying blindness as a condition that can be difficult and inconvenient to deal with, but which does not have to rob people of their humanity, intelligence, or zest for living. Fogg is remarkable in herself, having pioneered the use of the red-tipped white cane-formerly reserved for blind adults-with very young children and with those who have multiple impairments. Combining the best of American ingenuity and pioneering spirit with insight, intelligence, humility and a fierce belief that all humans deserve the right to have a say in the course of their lives, Fogg has guided countless blind children in achieving independence. In Traveling Blind Fogg tells the stories of fifteen of the students whose lives and experiences had the greatest impact on her. In these tales, each child is seen for who he is-rather than for who he is not, and each teaches Laura lessons about patience, hope, doubt, loss, control, judgment and, ultimately, joy. Traveling Blind: Life Lessons from Unlikely Teachers brings a deeper understanding of the struggles, perils and unexpected wonders of learning to negotiate this world without vision. Fogg relates her experiences, both in teaching and in learning to travel blindfolded herself, with honesty and insight, and never reduces a child to someone who should be pitied.

A NEW DIRECTION

Each step in my nightmare brought me closer to an airless chamber below the museum. Dusty, dark and cramped, the room was invisible to throngs of visitors in the building above, as they wandered the halls admiring works of the ancient masters. No voices down here below ground level—just echoes of the dull thud made when each painting was carted down the steps and dumped on top of the one before it. Piles of forgotten artwork towered around me, brown and unrecognizable with age and layers of crazed yellow varnish. It was my job to scrape each canvas down to the original paint and catalogue it. I stared hopelessly at the stacks and the chamber grew smaller, the walls moving in towards me. I stood paralyzed, sentenced to an eternity in this subterranean purgatory without light or sound.

I woke up from my bad dream sweaty and exhausted, yet charged. Convinced in my very core that the time had come for me to change direction. I had lived in Italy for the previous year, surrounded by cathedrals and palaces filled with masterpieces from the Renaissance, and had fallen easily into an Art History major upon coming home to the University of California at Berkeley. I was about to graduate to an uncertain future, with no job possibilities that were even remotely interesting to me. It was becoming more evident as each day passed that studying the two-dimensional creations of people who had been dead for three hundred years was not my calling. I needed a strong shot of life, in the here and now, with people who were still breathing and talking. I was ready for anything that would put an end to my recurring nightmare, but had no idea where to turn for inspiration.

On one particularly gray Berkeley day, I walked out of an art history class, miserably watching groups of students bustling around, all looking like they knew exactly where they were going. My final quarter as a senior was almost over and desperation about my future was looming dangerously close. I headed towards my apartment to cram for a test, changed my mind, and decided to go buy an ice cream first. Taking an unaccustomed path, I passed a rack of newspapers and saw that the new issue of the Daily CAL had come out. I grabbed a copy with the intention of stuffing it in my backpack to read later, but something moved me to scan the headlines before walking on. An article caught my attention and I stood there reading it, turning the paper over when it continued onto the back page. I never finished the article.

My eye went straight to a smallish advertisement, set within a simple black rectangle. “Volunteers needed at the California School for the Blind,” the letters spelled, followed by a contact number. I read the short ad a second time, my mind already gearing up to imagine myself spending a few hours a week tutoring some cute children who would benefit from my help. The idea was appealing—the CSB campus was close to my apartment, and going there would be a fun project for the rest of the quarter. I had never possessed the slightest desire to become a teacher, but this would be something useful to keep me occupied while I came up for air and tried to make some serious decisions about where I could search in the world of the living for an eventual career. It would be a welcome break from the routine of studying for classes I had lost interest in.

Within two days I was signed up at the School for the Blind and walking with a certain amount of trepidation towards my assigned classroom. Moving through the dim corridor that smelled of a hundred years of floor wax, I was stunned to realize how depressingly similar this place was to the chamber under the museum in my nightmare. I considered bolting. Never one to back out on a commitment, though, I missed my chance to flee and found myself in the classroom, face to face with Miss Hertz.

All business in her navy blue skirt and buttoned-to-the-neck white blouse, Miss Hertz immediately ordered me to sit next to Sarah Jane, who was busy banging out spelling words on her Braille writer. Sarah Jane was not cute, or even easy to look at. Her lumpy body stretched the seams of her out-of-style plaid dress, and she sported a whole lot of protruding teeth and greasy hair that looked like she had cut it herself. She smelled unwashed. None of the students in the room looked much like the groomed and orthodontured suburban kids I was used to baby-sitting. The inmates of Mrs. Hertz’ classroom all rocked and flapped their hands and rolled their heads around, and some of them had their knuckles inexplicably stuck into their eye sockets. I made myself quit staring, realizing a bit sheepishly that nobody in this sightless environment was aware of my rudeness. I buckled down to the project of trying to be of some use to Sarah Jane and her mysterious page of raised dots.

Our progress was suddenly interrupted by Miss Hertz shouting across the room in exasperated tones, “Sarah Jane, your eyes are backwards again! You get out of here this minute and put them in right!” I took five slow breaths and prayed that my lunch would stay where it belonged. Miss Hertz glared my way and instructed me to accompany Sarah Jane out of the classroom, to see to it that the offending eyes were indeed replaced in their correct sockets. Sensing that there was no graceful way out of this situation, I did as I was told. I was beginning to work up an unpleasant fantasy about exactly what I might be expected to do, but Sarah Jane, bless her heart, had the technique down. Bending over the drinking fountain in the hallway, she popped both artificial eyeballs into the palm of her hand, wetted them down and deftly re-inserted them. No big deal. I couldn’t make myself look to see if the eyes were actually relocated where they belonged, and probably wouldn’t have known the difference even if I had found the courage to examine them. I toddled into the classroom behind Sarah Jane and forced myself to attend to her spelling list during the remainder of the period.

I came back the next day, though I really wanted nothing more than to find a good reason to back out on my newfound tutoring commitment. I felt trapped in the dull confinement of the classroom, and Miss Hertz reminded me unpleasantly of my childhood piano teacher, the brittle old lady who made me endure my hour-long lesson the one day of my entire California childhood that it snowed. Sarah Jane never appealed to me much either, but having signed up to work with her three times a week, I decided I had better get used to her. I concentrated on her braille and may have even helped her a little.

Sarah Jane wasn’t the focus of my attention for long, though. A few weeks into my volunteer job, on the day of my twenty-second birthday, I was walking towards the school celebrating the heady spring weather that contrasted deliciously with the previous months of Berkeley fog. I’m a bit of a dreamer, slightly inclined towards magical thinking, and I was musing that the perfect weather on the first day of my twenty-third year of life might be an omen of good things to come. At that moment I looked up and noticed an elderly, pleasant-looking man out on the sidewalk in front of the main building, following a blind student with a white cane in his hand. The man appeared to be giving the student a lesson of some kind, directing the boy with quiet words and a gentle hand on the shoulder when the boy hit something with his cane or had trouble walking straight. I had never seen anything like that in my life, and puzzled over it a bit, slowing my pace so I could watch. There was no socially acceptable way to continue standing on the sidewalk gawking, and I was getting late for Sarah Jane, but I was compelled to walk over and ask the man, “Could you please tell me what you are doing?”

Leo Bailey, the Orientation and Mobility Instructor at CSB, grinned at me, asked my name, and shook my hand with an enthusiastic grip. He introduced his student, a young teen-ager named Jeff, who needed no prompting to reach towards my voice and shake my hand also. Jeff could hardly contain his delight at the novelty of suddenly having an audience for his lesson. He tried to stand politely still, but his body twitched with excitement and the hand clutching his cane contracted repeatedly with a pent up desire to move. I guessed that Jeff’s lessons with Leo were his favorite time of the day.

Something inside Leo immediately shone through to me … there was a happiness and an energy about him that I hadn’t noticed in any of the classroom teachers I had met so far. Leo didn’t appear to be crabby or jaded with his job, though he was clearly old enough to have been doing it for a number of years. He was visibly excited by my interest, and the spontaneous enthusiasm in his voice stirred that part of me that was looking for the answer to my nagging and increasingly worrisome question regarding what I wanted to do for my own career. My mind ran fast-forward to a vision of myself in Leo’s shoes, out on the sunny sidewalk with a student of my own.

I love to be outside. I need to be outside. I’ve known that about myself ever since I was a high school student refusing to take a typing class because I didn’t want to ever entertain the possibility of falling back on an office job if all else failed. As a tiny child my mother taught me to marvel at flowers, seasons and all kinds of weather. She and I spent hours watching insects or sitting on a rock waiting for birds to land near us. My greatest thrills were helping her garden or going on long walks in the hills with my father. Slow summer days were spent on a swaying perch in a treetop, and I got to sleep under the stars...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	8.9.2020
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Pädagogik
ISBN-10	1-0983-3380-2 / 1098333802
ISBN-13	978-1-0983-3380-5 / 9781098333805

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