[Ohio-talk] Braille glove

[David Cohen]

I am writing in response to the email regarding Haptic learning and
Braille forwarded from Doctor Avrish Chopra.  I am not writing to
discredit the Braille glove and do not want to express a sentiment of
debate about its possible usefulness for others.  I only want to share
my own personal experience and thoughts about Braille and the impact
of it in my own individual life.

Technology is wonderful and makes many things accessible I agree.
However I carry in my mind and heart many blind people who did all of
the same things we are doing today more or less without digital
devices that express the act of learning as if it is a stressful and
laborious task, something in life that must be done that comes with
physical and emotional struggle like it is the time of puberty
revisited again and again.  I read the email, thought of how I learned
Braille at age 20 and recognized similarity in the suggested sentiment
of difficulty that has never been separate from the act of learning
Braille as far as my 25 year experience validates.  The doctor’s
expressed opinion that learning Braille is not easy sounded like so
many television and radio advertisements.

It is easier now to buy car insurance.  People it is now so much
easier to travel at such and such airport using this airline.  It is
easier to get through the checkout at Kroger.  People people listen to
me it is so much easier to lose weight and we’re going totell you how
to do this in 3 easy steps.  It is easier to file an insurance claim,
easier to keep in contact with your friends, easier to work, cook
dinner and even easier to fall asleep after a hard day of living such
a difficult life.  It is even professed to be easier to receive Cancer
treatment.  It is easier to open a checking account, what?  When was
it ever difficult to sign one’s name?  It is easier to pay your bill,
schedule a visit from a plumber and easier to meet people, and even
easier to sue someone if you call this 800 number.  The advertisement
for easier makes the world in which we live out to be a daily
repetition of the 12 tasks of Hercules.  Learning Braille is not
difficult.  Learning to live with ignorance about blindness, now that
is difficult but whadda ya gonna do?

The late Doctor Jernigan and those who followed him had built-in tools
that did not require assembly or batteries to engage the skills
necessary to create their own futures.  The tools which they were in
possession of they could not leave on the table at Starbucks and in
truth never ever ran out of power or demanded upgrading.  In truth
many of our blind predecessors did much more than any of us with much
much less.  The proof of the successful blindpersons I admire and know
personally is in their pudding if you will.  They are and were
lawyers, school teachers, early Cobalt programmers with 3M, Honeywell
and American Express and they learned and lived when easier was known
simply as living and setting goals.

When I became blind at age 20 I was living with the certainty that all
blind people read Braille, that I must now learn Braille because I am
a blind person and did so.  I met the right people.  I took a lesson,
purchased a McDuffy Reader, was shown a slate and a stylus and how to
load it etc. and I had something to do to keep my brain feeding itself
at a time when I desperately needed mental engagement.  Engaging the
alternative techniques of blindness fed and strengthend the muscle of
my brain in the same way that bench presses build strength in the arms
and chest.

I believed into knowing and knew believingly that all blind people
read Braille so therein I taught myself and learned Braille.  I only
learned ipso facto that this was not the case and along with this very
surprising fact came all of the whys and wherefores about difficulty,
challenge and mental exhaustion that persists to this very day.

I’m not soapboxing for anyone but myself.  Braille helped me when I
was 20 and years later proved time after time in several different
ways to be beneficial outside of its obviously immediate use for
gaining proficiency. Braille helped develop my sense of touch which I
think is greatly understated as a useful tool again something much
more special in its use beyond the immediately obvious, and the mental
exercise I won’t even begin to detail and praise herein less this
message expand into Steinbeckian proportion.

The email from the doctor states that this glove will allow the person
to learn Braille and not be focused on the task.  What?  Will the
glove also breathe for me, remember where I put my house keys etc.?
Braille is said in the email to not be easy.  Why can’t it just be,
just simply be as it is?  Why must Braille be accepted as the 13th
task of Hercules by people who do not have the hands on experience to
know exactly what learning it truly is?  The blind people I’ve met in
the largest assemblage of blind people in the world have never
expressed the difficulty of learning Braille to me, such people only
speak of their appreciation and gratitude for Braille and what it has
given them.  People I meet who ask me about Braille and here my answer
about learning Braille 99.9% of the time respond with, “Oh that must
have been difficult.”  I have no answer for this statement because
what I know from personal experience is rendered unbelievable and
there is no amount of words that can penetrate this belief and only
the knowledge I possess that I can read Braille, you can’t, and that
it ain’t difficult or too challenging for the human mind exists within
myself to know its truth.  I have to laugh because those who express
this belief of inexperience are most often the same who park their
cars and enter grocery stores, and 30 minutes later upon exiting the
store have no recollection of where the car is in the parking lot.
Such a person walks aimlessly scanning lanes of parked cars without a
single landmark of mental assistance denoted in their short-term
memory despite the environment being comprised of so much useful
information.  Does someone really want to engage the learning process
in terms of easier?  No worries, once you find the car it has a GPS
that will guide you back home I think to myself.

Small successes, 26 letters X amount of letters each day is what I did
in 1990.  I had a great incentive to label all my music CDs in Braille
which offered the learning process variety and immediate reward.  I
was slowly learning how to identify, organize and develop a mental
strength of recall.  As a sidenote, the language I can detail
associated with learning not just Braille, but the alternative
techniques of blindness in general mirror all of the perfunctory
demands of employers found on career websites like organization,
independent working and prioritization skills etc.  It’s true.

Another digression of relative experience pertaining to the act of
learning is that I would today excitedly and eagerly engage blindness
rehabilitation training again for the simple fun and experience of it
in the same way people return to the cinema to see a movie repeatedly
and return to amusement parks several times and I bet that there are
others out there who feel this same way.  I would also return to
guidedog school annually to feel again the excitement and witness
first-hand the truly amazing that is enveloped in the simple and the
ordinary.  I use a cane exclusively now and have done so for many
years and routinely recall the first time I recognized with my ears
how it was possible to cross a street and let the idling engines on my
left that day direct me safely across.  This was only the beginning
just as learning the first 10 Braille letters was the beginning.  Both
skills have developed into tools I could not have imagined to be so
important to me, skills that still amaze and feed my soul to this day.
And in truth there is probably more to come.

Engaging Braille the way I did, which was 95% independently using that
wonderful learning tool called the McDuffy Reader was not easy and it
was not difficult, it was just exactly like anything and everything
else I’d ever engaged in my 20 years of life-learning that only asked
me to take and utilize what was given me to provide for me in the same
way a beaver uses its tail to live the life of a beaver.  Personally I
believe that to look upon learning or to engage the act of learning in
terms of made easier or disregarded as too difficult is to deny
creation its gift to me. It is to me like complaining about the
weather and simultaneously stating that each day of this life is a
gift.

The glove is neat.  Maybe its something the COSI museum might like to
display.  Easy and easier is for the Geico lizard, the helping hands
of Allstate, the 20 minute workout and Wendy’s which now makes it
easier to eat after midnight.  Reading Braille makes it possible to
read surreptitiously in front of people you find infinitely boring.
Braille makes it possible for you to occupy yourself within the
uncomfortable silence people in general feel inside an elevator with
strangers.  Learning the Braille code makes it possible to make mental
Braille short-form words and symbols into memorable words on telephone
keypads thus enabling you to recall an important number you did not
expect to be given.  The Braille code makes it possible to create
street addresses into possible words and acronyms which impresses the
hell out of people at parties and woos women.  And a Braille grocery
list pulled from your pocket in the bread isle at Kroger has the power
to stop the movement of strangers so they might attempt to observe and
this is in my own experience the first step in engaging people in a
world in which too much division exists.