[nabs-l] Training centers not the real world

Mon Nov 11 03:53:31 UTC 2013

Actually, many parents of autistic children will sometimes send them to a
school or specialty resource center for people with autism. While I totally
agree that at least the training center nearest my home does not seem to
give its students a realistic taste of the world while supposedly preparing
them to live in the real world, I see the idea behind the training center
for the blind. While most parents can at least bumble around and figure out
how to "train" their sighted children to be self-sufficient, employable
adults with at least a touch of ambition, many sighted adults have very low
expectations of their blind children. You also sometimes get sighted adults
who would love for their blind children to be as self-sufficient and
capable as they themselves are, but either can't fathom how to teach them
the skills they need, or become lazy in the process and decide it's just
faster/easier/less expensive/less messy to do things for them. My parents
were guilty of this. They knew I could easily learn to serve and cut my own
food at the dinner table, but I wasn't going to learn how simply by
watching them do it, and at meal time, once the food hit the table, they
found it less stressful for them to do it themselves so they wouldn't have
to deal with the mess I would make the first few times I tried, or the
extra time it would take to stand over me and show me the proper way to
hold a steak knife... Consequently, I had to teach myself to do this in my
late teens when I began having more meals without my parents present...
This is just one example of many, and a very basic one at that. It gets
harder and harder for sighted parents who have been taking these
"shortcuts" in parenting their blind kids from early on as they move
towards things like food preparation, laundry and home maintenance skills,
independent travel, money management, the skills of employment, and so on.
Many parents think the "experts on blindness" at their local public school
are supposed to take on these tasks of parenting for them, but that is
neither fair nor realistic in the slightest, and consequently, some blind
folks reach adulthood and need a way to gain these skills and this
knowledge from someone who has both the knowledge and the patience to teach
them thoroughly and properly. Training centers are (should be) a great
resource for this.

On Sun, Nov 10, 2013 at 8:39 PM, Valerie Gibson <valandkayla at gmail.com>wrote:

> Yeah, you google them, which means indirectly learning from others.
>  That’s not learning it completely and soupy on your own.  And how would
> you know what to google if you didn’t know the question?  If that makes
> sense.
>
> for example, a blind person, who’s bee blind their whole life, most likely
> wouldn’t know that looking at a person when speaking to them is culturally
> acceptable if he or she was not told or if he or she did not find this out
> through another way.
> On Nov 10, 2013, at 8:09 PM, Littlefield, Tyler <tyler at tysdomain.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Valerie:
> > I am confused on one point you make. While I did get some basic training
> from my school district (and by basic I mean very very basic) and my mom
> provided a bit more, a lot of what I did learn I did teach myself. I've
> always been able to take some small knowledge of something and put it to
> some use--if I have questions, more times than not I can find them out with
> Google. I also know other blind people who have lost their sight or have
> always been blind who do the same thing. How is this hard to believe? Do we
> need someone to show us everything?
> > On 11/10/2013 10:05 PM, Valerie Gibson wrote:
> >> Greetings,
> >>
> >> This could get ugly. haha.
> >>
> >> I think the reason being that people who can see are taught mostly
> through modeling as children.  They watch how their parents act and react
> to situations and they follow suit.  As blind children, we don’t get such
> visual feedback and our sighted peers either don’t know how, or don’t think
> to tell us how, things are done.  They see the world visually, and unless
> they can think non visually, they find it difficult to express such ways of
> doing things like crossing a street.  To us, things such as crossing
> streets or cooking seem like a “Duh” moment, but in order for to seem like
> that, we must have had someone tell us how to do things non visually.
> >>
> >> I don’t usually buy it when people, who have been blind their entire
> lives, say, “Oh i taught myself this or that”.  Sometimes it may be true,
> but more often than not, scaffolding has ucurred.  Sorry, i’m working on a
> psych paper. it shows. :D
> >>
> >> For people who have been sighted and who have gone blind, hhow
> difficult it must be for them to have to see the world differently…no pun
> intended.
> >>
> >> You mentioned autistic children…most autistic  children are treated
> differently than their sighted peers or peers who are not autistic, unless
> their autism is mild enough where they can get away with “normalcy”.  I
> could be wrong here. I only know a handful of autistic people.
> >>
> >> In the case of blind schools, I believe this starts with the parents
> thinking that surely a blind school will be able to teach my child what i
> cannot, and for some kids this may be true. Better send the child off to a
> school where teachers specialize in disabled children than risk making a
> mistake. I’m sure this last sentence is what parents must think.  It’s a
> valid concern, I think.
> >>
> >> Another reason may be that schools for the blind offer the child with a
> more rounded life as far as extra coriculars.  It did for me, and I only
> went my last two years of high school.  Sports are adapted so that blind
> people can participate, unlike your typical PE class.  This isn’t to say
> that PE classes at public schools can’t modify their curriculum, but many
> aren’t going to do it just for one student, or that’s how it was when i was
> in high school, but I’m sure things have changed in the past six years.
> >>
> >> Back to the training programs, many people have heard, “you can’t do
> this. you’re blind” their entire lives. Training centers, such as the ones
> sponsored by the NFB, do provide confidence building skills for the train.
>  This, i think, is the most important skill one can gain at a center.  For
> those who have condifence, they may not need the center as much as others,
> but who can say.
> >>
> >> I hope this helps, and if I am speaking that which is incorrect in
> anything that I have said, please feel free to correct me. :)
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On Nov 10, 2013, at 7:48 PM, RJ Sandefur <joltingjacksandefur at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>
> >>> Why do we send blind people to training centers? Why do we send blind
> people to "schools for the blind" We as blind people live in the real
> world,Why do we do it? You don't see mom sending Johnny who has autism to
> aschool for autistic kids!
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> >
> > --
> > Take care,
> > Ty
> > http://tds-solutions.net
> > He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; he
> that dares not reason is a slave.
> >
> >
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