[NFB-Utah] June At Large Chapter call tonight

[Nfb Utah]

Please join us on Wednesday, June 12 at 7:30 PM via conference call
for our monthly NFB of Utah At Large chapter meeting. This month we
will be discussing an article from the May issue of the Braille
Monitor that many of our members from small towns can relate to. The
article we will be discussing is from the May issue of the Braille
Monitor entitled "Big Opportunities in a Small Town: Thinking Outside
the Box."



You can read the article by clicking on the link below, or scrolling
past the signature line for the text.

https://nfb.org/images/nfb/publications/bm/bm19/bm1905/bm190506.htm



The line will open at 7:15 PM, and begin promptly at 7:30 PM Mountain
Standard time.
To join the meeting, please call:

877-394-5901
Access code: NFBUtah (632-8824)


Best,

Jennifer Kennedy

At Large Chapter Coordinator

National Federation of the Blind of Utah

Big Opportunities in a Small Town: Thinking Outside the Box

by Dennis Miller



>From the Editor: Missouri is a rural state with a lot of farmland and
many small towns separated by a considerable distance. In most of
these there is no bus service, no taxicabs, and though you can bring
up the rideshare app of your choice, there simply are no rides to be
had. It is a given for people who live in a small town that one will
have a car or a pickup truck that they can drive, so many people who
are blind take as an article of faith the idea that the only way for
us to be independent is to move to a place large enough to meet our
basic transportation needs.

Although for many this is a choice, for some it is not. Perhaps they
are unwilling to part from the family support which is the primary
focus of their lives. Some blind people are themselves the support for
their loved ones as they take care of older parents or siblings who
cannot take care of themselves. So what do you do when you've gone
through school, have gotten rehabilitation money to get a college
degree, and find yourself in a small town here in Missouri?

The answer to this question can be found in part in the presentation
made to the convention of the National Federation of the Blind of
Missouri on March 23, 2019, by Dennis Miller, a member of the Missouri
affiliate who is blind and significantly hard of hearing. In these
remarks he provides concrete examples of how he has managed to get
work and some uncomfortable examples of why we sometimes fall short of
the goal he has achieved. Push for what you want, but don't just wait;
do what you can until you can do what you want to do. The need to
survive should make this clear, but sometimes programs that are
intended as a safety net end up being a lifeboat. The problem is that
a lifeboat is never intended to be a vessel on which someone lives
permanently. It is way too small and has none of the necessities most
of us require and take for granted. Over time that lifeboat is
transformed from a safe refuge to a prison, and far too often we don't
realize that we are making a choice to stay in it. Staying in the
lifeboat occurs when we decide to give up on seeking employment or
pretend to ourselves that there are just so many choices out there
that we can't bring ourselves to make one. Here is what Dennis said
about finding employment where he wants to live as a part of living
the life he wants:

Thank you, President Wright. What an honor it is for me to be here
among you folks today. This is only my second National Federation of
the Blind convention, and I'm very much enjoying it.

I've known Shelia Wright for almost thirty years now, and when we
first met it was at an agency called Blind Focus. While I was a
student there, and I was going through a lot of difficult adjustments,
this lady was kind enough to shepherd me through all of it. Ever since
that point, when she has asked me to do something, I've asked three
questions: when, where, and how much am I getting paid? After a few
years I realized that the answer to the third question wasn't going to
change, so now I just ask when and where.

I want to talk briefly today about my experience living in a small
town and being employed. The residents of my small town may not like
some of the things I say, but so be it. Actually Kirksville is a very
small community of
17,000 people. It's ninety miles to the north of Columbia, and some of
you in your lifetime have probably had the misfortune of traveling
through it on your way to somewhere else. Kirksville is one of these
towns where once you've gone to the Walmart supercenter, you've about
seen everything.

But Kirksville is my home. It is where I was born and raised. It is
where I went to school as a totally blind person and graduated from
the university there. When I graduated from Truman State University,
the district supervisor for Rehabilitation Services for the Blind (who
has since been put out to pasture) told me that if I ever wanted to be
employed, I had to leave Kirksville. He said there was absolutely
nothing for me and Kirksville. For a while I thought he might be
right.

I graduated with a degree in broadcast communications and minored in
political science. I spent several years living out my dream in radio,
but I left radio because there was very little money in it, and
unfortunately there's very little need for humans anymore. It's become
almost totally automated.

I worked several years in the independent living industry, and I
wanted to do something different. I really liked the idea of thinking
outside the box, maybe doing some things on my own. And I think this
may be the major focus of my talk today.

Sometimes when you live in a small community, opportunities come down
and hit you on the head. If you are there, and if you're willing, you
can take advantage of them. The first opportunity I was given was to
spend six years as a contract Braille instructor for an entity over in
Milan, Missouri, which is even smaller than our town of Kirksville.
Milan is about thirty-five miles to the west. Some of you may remember
the young man I helped, because he won an NFB scholarship and took
that on to Northwest Missouri State University where he graduated with
honors. He's now married and very happy and very gainfully employed.
So I was given an opportunity that required my being in the right
place at the right time and being willing to think outside the box,
being willing to do something that I couldn't imagine myself doing. I
never thought of being a teacher. I hated school. But being a teacher
was what I've been in one form or another since 2000.

My experience with the Braille instructor position led to a contract
with TAPI [the Telecommunications Program for Internet], a wonderful
program operated by the Missouri Assistive Technology Project that
provides equipment and instruction to help blind people get on the
internet. But after you do so much training in a small town like
Kirksville, you run out of people who need it.

The next question I asked myself was where am I going from here? In
the summer of 2006 I happened to overhear a conversation among parents
who had blind children who were being homeschooled. The state of
Missouri had already passed a law that requires all graduating seniors
to have a working knowledge of the state and the United States
constitutions. That applies to everyone, whether you are in a public
school or being educated in a private or homeschool. These parents
were commiserating among themselves, saying, "We don't think we know
enough to be able to teach this. We don't have the skills. What are we
going to do? We barely understand the Constitution ourselves. How are
we going to teach these crucial documents to our children?"

One of the parents said, "I think Dennis has a background in political
science."

That piqued their interest, and they turned to me and said, "Would you
be interested in teaching a civics class for children who are
homeschooled, both middle school and high school students?"

My first thought was that I had never taught a group before, but
almost immediately my second was that I would certainly give it a try.
They also said, "While you're teaching that, would you mind teaching a
public speaking course?" So that's how my experience in teaching large
groups of kids went, teaching civics and public speaking. I developed
my own way of teaching civics because there was no set formula. I
wasn't in a public classroom; I was in a private setting where I could
kind of do my own thing. I decided that instead of using a textbook, I
would teach directly from the documents themselves. This means that I
taught directly from the Declaration of Independence, the United
States Constitution, and the Missouri Constitution.
I had a lot of success with that. The kids seemed to like that it was
very interactive. They were encouraged to ask questions and to venture
answers.

We came to Jefferson City every year to meet with their senators and
representatives. One year we had a particular representative who took
a strong interest in our class. I can't remember the issue (I suspect
it was not a major one), but it was up for a vote. Our representative
walked over to the kids and said, "How should I vote on this?" They
listened to the debate, they told him, and then they were able to see
him go vote in the way they had suggested. That may have been how he
was going to vote anyway, but it was a different way of doing things
that said to them that what they thought mattered.

This year is actually the first year I have not taught that civics
class because, through my teaching of that, I have built a reputation
as a good teacher. So when the city of Kirksville got a grant for this
teaching of English as a second language, they turned to me, and I
accepted. We have two manufacturing plants, one in Milan and one in
Kirksville. Many of their employees are from African speaking nations
as well as some Latin American nations. We have people from the
Democratic Republic of the Congo, Togo, the Ivory Coast, Thailand,
Indonesia, Mexico, South Korea, Venezuela, Panama, and Puerto Rico.
There are a wide variety of people, but it works.

I happen to go to church with the lady who is responsible for that
grant, and I asked her "How do you do that?" She said, "What we really
need are volunteers who are willing to talk to the adults. Dennis, you
would be perfect at that because you have such a strong curiosity and
interest. I think it is something that you would really enjoy, and
they would enjoy you."

I promised her that I would give it a try. For those of you who don't
know, I do have some hearing difficulties. I have a cochlear implant
which I got a couple years ago, but I wasn't quite sure how it would
work out. I said, "Okay, I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do
this, but I will give it a try." I started the job in January of 2018,
and they kept asking me to increase my hours. I started out doing this
just one day a week, and that went until the end of the school year.
They then wrote my position into the grant so that I could teach more
hours and actually get paid. The request to increase my hours has
continued, and it has been the most rewarding thing that I have ever
done in my life. I love every second of it. I would not trade it for
the world.

So why do I bring all this up? I bring it up because when I came to my
first convention in 2006, I didn't know I could've imagined my doing
any of those things. I was not a teacher. I knew nothing about
teaching. I didn't even like books unless I was reading them for
myself for pleasure. The point that I have come here to make is that
we need to be willing to think outside the box. When an opportunity
comes your way, don't be afraid to say, hey, I'd like to try that. A
lot of times what happens is that we go to school, we get a degree,
and we don't find a job within a certain amount of time in the area in
which we got our degree. We then give up. Yes, the unemployment rate
among blind people and people with disabilities in general is
extremely high. Some of that is because we are not given the
opportunities that we deserve, but, in my opinion, some of that is
that we don't take advantage of all the opportunities that are out
there. [applause] You know, if someone said, "Dennis, do you want to
collect trash out of the street?" I would have to admit that that is
not a job that I would really want to do, but keep in mind that
somebody has to do it.

When I started as a civics teacher, it was as a volunteer. The same is
true for the ESL class. As I said, they then rolled me into the grant
so that I can get paid. Now maybe I didn't want to start out as a
volunteer, but they needed the work done, and I wanted the challenge.
Had I not taken that opportunity, someone else would've. That somebody
else would now be written into their grant, and I would not be working
every week.

So my real point in all of this is that when you are looking for a
job, be willing to explore-be willing to explore, be willing to
experiment, be willing to try something different. If I had an
advanced bachelor's degree in chemistry and I couldn't find a job in
chemistry, I'd probably be upset, but it really comes down to do you
want to work or do you want to stay at home? Sometimes I think we
limit ourselves because we're not willing to think outside the box. We
too often tell ourselves that we are above this job, or this job isn't
what I want. I know that when I graduated from college, if you would
have come to me and asked if I wanted to teach immigrants English, I
would've said absolutely not. No way! But as I said, this has become
the most rewarding thing I've ever done in my life, and it is now
something I would not trade for the world.

I leave you with this plea and challenge: be willing to try, be
willing to expand your horizons, be willing to dream, be willing to go
into an area that is outside your comfort zone. I had never been
around immigrants before; I told you I live in Kirksville, Missouri. I
didn't even know we had immigrants. I just assumed somebody else did
all of those factory jobs. But these people have become some of my
best friends. I am extremely comfortable around them, and they are
very comfortable around me. They look at me outside of the classroom
as somebody they can rely on to help them if they get in a difficult
position. But again that is an opportunity that, had I not been
willing to take that chance and take that risk, would've gone to
somebody else. Don't limit yourself. Never think that something isn't
right for you until you have taken the opportunity to try it. It's
okay to try it and not like it. I did not particularly enjoy working
in the independent living center-it wasn't my thing. I did it because
it was a job, and I needed to work. How do you know if you don't like
something until you try it?

Some of you in here may remember a man named Casey Kasem. He's
probably too old for some of you. Back when I was a small boy, Casey
Kasem had a weekly show on the radio called America's Top Forty. He
always ended the show with the same signature line, and I'm going to
end my presentation in the same way. "Keep your feet on the ground and
keep reaching for the stars."