[blindkid] computers as school credit

[Richard Holloway]

> However,
> with cane travel and daily living skills, my parents were much more
> reticent and mostly relied on the "professionals" to teach me in a
> very formal way, and I had little opportunity to practice these skills
> in between lessons. As an adult, you can guess which skills I am
> naturally comfortable with and which skills I am not. 

Arielle,

Since this was not greatly discussed before. I would offer briefly that while most parents have some knowledge and opinion on basic school work--- reading and math and such, typically-sighted parents tend to be entirely clueless about O&M matters at first. It is starting from scratch with O&M vs. adapting what we know about traditional school work for matters of general education.

We absolutely had to go to battle with our local center for the blind in Atlanta when we wanted Kendra to have a cane in her hand at 18 months of age. And to be totally candid, if we had not had a very open, revealing conversation with Joe Cutter on this topic, I don't know if we would have managed to stand up and say "no, our child will use her cane" with her being so young and having so little experience on our part, at that point.

Professionals are often warning parents they will actually CAUSE problems by putting a cane in their kids' hands too early and then bad habits willhave to be unlearned. This center actually took all the other parents in our child's class aside and told them our child was using a cane AGAINST their advice (they wanted her using a huge "pre-cane device" made of pvc and we said no). Common sense told us that sighted kids don't understand the concept of walking before they try to walk on their own, so why in the world does the O&M profession try to convince the rest of the world that blind kids are different in that regard? 

Most parents at that stage don't know any better, and frankly, they are intimidated. At first, sighted people are often terrified of a white cane and what it represents; the notion of blindness. Before I was the parent of a blind child, I can recall conversations (only in passing) with only two blind people. I was 36 years old at this point. So what did I know about blindness with my perhaps 5  minutes of verbal interaction with blind people?

I have no answer here to offer, but I underscore the problem being largely that O&M professionals virtually steamroll over parents and tell them "you will do things like this, you will use this cane... " and on and on.

I think we fall victim to something similar with daily living skills if "professionals" are telling us "this is how blind people do this". Remember, we have no experience with any of this at first, so it is hard to find a foundation upon which to build an argument with someone who holds a graduate degree in these areas where we not only have no formal training, but generally (in the early years) we have no knowledge about these matters in the first place.

All I can suggest (with no clue how to make it happen) is to get professionals to behave in a more sensitive and empowering way with these areas so parents come to realize that they actually CAN help heir kids lean from Mom & Dad how to do a lot of these things.