[Nfbk] Happy Birthday Louis Braille

[Joey Couch]

I thought you all may like this.
Read and enjoy.
From: Penny Reeder <penny.reeder at gmail.com>

Happy Birthday Louis Braille!
January 4, 2011, 8:26 am
Dear Louis Braille,
I’m writing to send you a birthday greeting.
Tomorrow is your two-hundred-and-second
birthday, which means that braille, the code you
invented that allows people who
are blind to read and write and communicate, must
be about 187 years old, since you
were only 15 when you invented the code!
Dear Louis, that just blows me away! When I was 15, I was busy
pretending that I could see just fine. My nose was quite literally
buried deep inside every book I read; I was spending three or four
more hours getting my tenth-grade homework done than my
fully-sighted classmates, and I was in a “math basics” class (for
dummies) because the guidance counselor at the high school I was
attending said none of the math teachers could figure out how to
teach geometry to “someone like me!” I would have been so much
better off, dear Louis, had I known the braille code or about your
life’s work of making braille the accepted literacy code for people
who are blind worldwide and going forward in time.
Dear Louis, I was misguided for so much of my
youth about blindness and about braille.
First, I thought that if I could see, even a
little bit, I wasn’t “really blind.”
Most of my teachers and all of the Caroline
County, MD, public school administrators thought the same thing.
That’s why they insisted that I use print, and that’s why they
couldn’t figure out how to teach me geometry or physics, and that’s
why I spent so much time on homework. And that’s why I gave up on
piano lessons, which I loved, when I couldn’t read the music in the
Grade Three John Thompson music book, and also why, two years
later, I went off to college without any useable blindness skills
at all! In college, Louis, I went crazy trying to keep up with the
reading load. Then I discovered that I could hire people to read
aloud to me. And when I signed up for books from Recording for the
Blind (now Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic) things got better.
Even so, I had to change my intended major from
Spanish and stopped at Spanish III
because I couldn’t read the print in the advanced
Spanish textbooks. Imagine how
much happier I might have been with my classes
and my choices about majors if I had
known Braille! It’s a sad state of affairs that
this misguidance is still occurring
in today’s mainstream schools with children who
have extremely low vision or are
blind. Sometimes parents are told that because of
“modern digital communications”
like audio books, braille isn’t really necessary.
But in my opinion, braille is essential
for
literacy gains.
Dear Louis, it took me several decades to see the
proverbial light, but thank God I found out that braille is just
about the most useful skill a person who is blind – even a person
with very low vision – can learn! Thank God I took the braille
reading and writing courses from the (free) Hadley School for the
Blind, and from a teacher in my state’s Division of Rehabilitation
Services! Thank goodness there were braille magazines to help to
practice my braille skills, like “Our Special Magazine,” from
National Braille Press, and the Matilda Ziegler Magazine (now sadly
discontinued in hard-copy braille).
Oh, dear Louis, the stories I could tell – about
learning to use a Braille’nSpeak
and then taking notes in graduate school faster
than any of my sighted classmates;
about borrowing print-braille books from National
Library Services and joining National
Braille Press’s “Braille Book Club,” so that I
could read picture books to my then
four-year-old son while I was learning to read
the braille code myself. Louis, my
young sighted son didn’t care how slowly I read,
he only cared that I was reading
him a story, and later on, when he was struggling
to learn to read print, we read
together, I reading one braille page, and he
reading the next print page – until
we had both mastered the skills of literacy! He
was my last of six children, and
the only one to whom I was ever able to read aloud!
Dear Louis, I have so many reasons to thank you.
Without your code, I couldn’t do
my job. Without your code, I would be unable to
keep personal records, to copy recipes,
to find addresses and phone numbers for friends
and colleagues. Without your code,
I couldn’t label my microwave or my oven controls
– Imagine having to ask a family
member for help every time I wanted to cook them
a meal! I don’t think I could have
succeeded in graduate school because I could
never have given an acceptable oral
presentation, or read my class notes even an hour
after I had written them, or kept
track of my research, especially the
bibliographic information! If I didn’t know
braille, I would have missed out on the hundreds
of books I have downloaded and read
from Bookshare.org and the National Library
Service’s Web Braille project. And without
your code, dear Louis, I would never have
developed the self confidence I enjoy (most
of the time) today, or have embraced my disability the way I have come to now.
Dear Louis, thank you from the bottom of my heart! And, happy birthday!
Sincerely,
Penny Reeder

From:

http://abledbody.com/profoundlyyours/2011/01/04/a-birthday-ode-to-louis-braille/

Joey Couch
cell phone 606-216-8033
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joey.couch at gmail.com
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