[Nfbf-l] Choosing Rehabilitation Programs and Instructors

[Lappland]

The Braille Monitor 
May 2003

Open Letter to a Blind Person:
Choosing Rehabilitation Programs and Instructors
by Mike Bullis


Mike Bullis
>From the Editor: Mike Bullis has been teaching blind people how to travel, 
read Braille, and find employment since 1974. Not content simply to teach, 
Mike likes to practice what he preaches. He has owned eleven businesses, 
including restaurants, a motorcycle shop, and a mediation business. In the 
November 2002 issue of the Braille Monitor, we published his first "Open 
Letter to a Blind Person." The topic was determining whether and when to 
take the time to get truly effective rehabilitation training. In the 
following letter he addresses the question of finding a program that meets 
your needs. This is what he says:

We now turn to the difficult subject of choosing which programs and 
instructors will best meet your needs as a blind person. For many of you 
reading this letter, the training you receive will be paid for through the 
federal Vocational Rehabilitation Act. This act places much emphasis on your 
ability and right to make an informed choice. Under purpose, the act states 
in part:

The goals of the nation properly include the goal of providing individuals 
with disabilities with the tools necessary to make informed choices and 
decisions; and achieve equality of opportunity, full inclusion and 
integration in society, employment, independent living, and economic and 
social self-sufficiency.

This emphasis in the law on making informed choices, along with other 
trends, means that as a blind person you will have ever more options to 
choose from in the type of training you receive. Gone forever are the days 
when you went to the local rehabilitation agency and the staff provided what 
they had available. Today your state agency may provide training, other 
private agencies or contractors in the community may do similar work, or 
private programs across the country may offer training.

When it comes to blindness training, it makes sense to go wherever you need 
to to acquire the necessary skills once and for all and then move on with 
your life. If it means going to another state or even another country 
temporarily, in my view it is still worth the sacrifice. Every program has a 
teaching philosophy and style that may or may not fit your needs and produce 
a positive outcome. In theory the competition among them will help all 
programs become better so that all consumers will benefit.

However, just as choosing your long-distance provider can be confusing, so 
too deciding on what training you should receive and from whom can be 
mystifying. What's more, you are making decisions that will affect the rest 
of your life, so it's important to get them right if you can.

In discussing blindness training, I will assume that you're looking for a 
comprehensive program as opposed to acquiring one skill like Braille or 
computer use. You certainly can and should use the information provided here 
to help you make decisions about single courses, but in general this 
discussion will focus on programs providing a broad array of courses, 
including travel, Braille, computer skills, cooking, and grocery shopping.

The first difficulty blind people face is making an informed choice about 
the services being offered. A newly blind person is likely to perceive very 
few possibilities. Life appears limited and frustrating, and it seems as if 
very little can be done to mitigate the tragedy of blindness. The average 
person has a mental image of blind people as helpless, living in a world not 
just physically dark, but barren of life's fullness. Whether we admit it or 
not, the image of the blind beggar of old still haunts the recesses of our 
minds in the twenty-first century.

Then too, having done most things visually, those struggling with recent 
blindness find it nearly impossible to imagine doing them without sight. 
Hobbled by this limiting concept of blindness, how can one make an informed 
choice about appropriate training or future possibilities?

 The fact is that, depending upon the motivation of the person and the 
quality of the training program, blindness need not be a tragedy. Life can 
once again become normal--filled with job, spouse, and the range of 
challenges and joys that one's neighbors enjoy. Thousands of blind people 
work, raise families, and live the American dream with vigor and competence. 
However, doing so often depends upon the quality of the trainers and 
rehabilitation programs chosen.

One of the keys to making a positive choice is having high expectations. If 
you expect little from a training program and think that blind people can't 
accomplish much, your decisions about trainers and programs will be colored 
by those assumptions. If your image of a blind person is a fumbling, 
bumbling, slow person who simply is not competent when assessed by normal 
sighted standards, you will not expect much from the trainers and programs 
that serve you. Furthermore, if you think that the average blind person is 
inherently slower and less competitive than the average sighted person, you 
will probably conclude that much of what I am about to say is unrealistic, 
perhaps delusional.

I can only tell you that I have been fortunate enough throughout my life to 
associate with thousands of blind people. I have observed that people's 
skills and ability to compete successfully in life depend first and foremost 
upon their beliefs about what is possible. That is, if they believe deep 
down that they can be excellent travelers or Braille readers or computer 
users, they probably will be. By "believe," I don't mean that they just give 
lip service to platitudes about the capacities of blind people. 
Unfortunately blind people face a lot of pressure to say we believe things 
we do not. At some point in your instruction you need to find somebody with 
whom you can share your actual fears and anxieties about blindness, not just 
repeat platitudes about how competent blind people are.

In general today's society demands that we refer to people with all kinds of 
disabilities in politically correct language such as "differently abled" and 
"special." This effort may perhaps have some benefit, but it ignores or 
glosses over our deepest feelings that disability means inferiority. A major 
part of your training must focus on this central concern. What is required 
is a combination of counseling and activities geared to help you develop a 
positive attitude about blindness.

Second, success depends upon the quality of the instruction students 
receive. If their instructors believe in the normality of blind people and 
expect students to accomplish ordinary tasks in the ordinary amount of time, 
they most likely will. If, on the other hand, their instructors expect them 
to be slower and less competitive, they will be. This outcome is even more 
pronounced when the instructors are blind. Whether these instructors 
recognize it or not, they become models for their students. That is, 
students make their instructors the standard for what they expect a blind 
person to accomplish. If the instructor is competent, the student will 
believe that becoming competent is possible.

The only caveat here is that a program should employ more than one competent 
instructor. Most students resist the idea that blind people can be 
competent. Because of their ingrained belief in the fumbling, stumbling 
blind person, they find it all too easy to write off one successful blind 
instructor as a fluke or aberration. They will regard him or her as 
exceptional or special and will assume that they themselves cannot be 
expected to do the same thing. So ideally a program will have two or more 
really competent blind instructors to help root out this myth.

I should add that ideally students nearing the end of their training or 
already having finished it will be available to serve as examples. These 
students will provide the indispensable example for newer students. At some 
point a new student should be able to say, "If that student can do it, so 
can I." But the only way this will happen is if students are exposed to 
people whom they perceive as equals in intellect and general ability.

The program you choose should also expose you to many blind people in the 
community as they go about their normal lives. The phrase "seeing is 
believing" is just as true for blind people as it is for the sighted. You 
must come to believe deeply that you can compete equally in society. You 
probably don't really believe that now. Your mind--and possibly your deepest 
instincts--are likely to be sending you the message that you simply can't 
expect to compete and that blindness means inferiority.

In order to change this programming you must observe lots of capable blind 
people every day. They will help you retool your attitudes and expectations. 
I don't mean that the training program should bring in conspicuously 
successful community leaders to speak. Speakers are useful, but they don't 
usually help transform your beliefs. Why? Because they're just talking, and 
talk is cheap. When week after week you see blind people nonchalantly 
cooking, traveling, raising their children, and going to work, the truth of 
what I have been saying will begin to sink in. Until then, for all you know, 
the imported blind speakers are simply deluding themselves into believing 
that their blindness isn't a big deal.

One blind person put it very clearly: "This blind guy comes in and gives a 
speech about how capable he is and then leaves in a cab. Who did he think he 
was kidding?" One might argue that the blind speaker had every right to take 
a cab and might have had a very good reason for doing so, but in a training 
program example is everything, and the example set was a poor one. If, on 
the other hand, the trainee had been exposed to this speaker regularly, he 
might have observed that the person was an excellent cane user, competent 
Braille reader, and so forth. But the snapshot given the trainee was of a 
person who couldn't travel without using cabs. A good training program 
should provide more than snapshots; it should provide intimate looks at the 
lives ordinary blind people live. That usually means blind staff who are 
willing to welcome students into their homes and let them observe what their 
home life is really like. This critical element is often left out of 
training programs.

Look for a program with lots of activities--cooking lunches or dinners, 
traveling independently to new places, and engaging in physical recreation. 
Blind staff should fully participate in these activities as examples to 
students. Again more advanced blind students can also act as catalysts to 
help new students adopt a view of blindness as synonymous with independence, 
not limitation and frustration.

One of the reasons it is difficult to choose appropriate trainers is that 
virtually everyone in the blindness field uses the same words to describe 
what they do. Everyone claims that they will help you become independent, 
get the best training, and recognize the negative attitudes and stereotypes 
about blindness. In this day of politically correct statements, almost no 
one is going to say, "You really ought to accept the limitations of 
blindness. You can't expect to walk as fast as others; you'll always walk 
slowly. You will be less efficient in the kitchen than the average sighted 
cook. You just have to understand these things and live with them. You'll 
always read Braille more slowly than a sighted person reads print. We are 
teaching you to read print instead of Braille because Braille is so slow."

No, people won't say these things to you because such statements are no 
longer politically correct. Besides, most teachers have convinced themselves 
that they are doing the very best they can and are practicing 
state-of-the-art instruction. Though some programs or teachers consistently 
turn out better travelers or Braille readers or typists than others, no 
comparison chart exists for review. Another thing to remember is that, even 
in very good programs, some instructors are better than others.

Your task is to devise a method of observation that will tell you whether 
people indeed practice what they teach. One of my tenets of good 
rehabilitation teaching is that the instructor should help the student learn 
to problem solve. No teacher of travel or cooking or Braille can expose you 
to every known situation or problem you will face. Therefore the goal of 
effective instruction should be to help you devise methods that will help 
you efficiently solve the problems of blindness. Again virtually every 
teacher will tell you that this is what he or she does.

So how do you tell if the method used will produce that result? One 
technique is the counting method. Watch an instructor teach a lesson and 
count how many times he or she provides information or answers and how many 
times he or she lets the student discover the solutions for himself or 
herself. Teachers who are giving answers more than 70 percent of the time 
are not teaching much problem solving. Teachers who make, let, or help 
students find their own answers more than 70 percent of the time are truly 
teaching problem solving.

Because people often seem confused about what is meant by problem solving 
and discovery learning, as it is called, let me illustrate by showing what 
it is not. The teacher says, "Which direction are you walking--north, south, 
east, or west?"

The student says, "west."

The teacher says, "No, that's not right."

The student then guesses, "south," and the teacher agrees.

I hope you can see that no problem solving is being taught here unless it is 
the increasing ability of the student to make educated guesses and wheedle 
answers out of teachers.

The instructor intent upon teaching mobility and problem solving might start 
out the same way: "Which way are you traveling?" When the student says 
"south," the teacher says, "Why do you think that?" The answer to this 
response helps the instructor understand the extent to which the student is 
truly developing useful skills in any situation as opposed to right or wrong 
answers. Whether the student gives a correct or incorrect answer, the 
teacher probes, "Which environmental cues favor your answer, and which ones 
do not?" This is a very active process that really stimulates thinking and 
mental growth. It pushes students to use sound, wind, sun, 
traffic--everything that might help form an intelligent decision.

Here is an example from the kitchen. One instructor might say, "Here is a 
little device that will help you tell when a cup is full by beeping." The 
student is then presented with the device and shown its use.

Another instructor says, "How many ways can you think of to tell when a cup 
is full?" The teacher and student might then experiment with several ways of 
determining the answer--weight, temperature, touch, sound, or special 
devices. When the second student is through with the lesson, he or she 
understands that blindness presents opportunities to find solutions to 
problems. The first student concludes that blindness presents problems that 
require teachers to provide special devices and expert information to solve. 
The first method teaches that blind people have to consult experts and learn 
tricks. The second method teaches that there are many ways to solve problems 
and that they are easily soluble. Both instructors undoubtedly believe that 
they are teaching the same level of independence.

When evaluating programs, potential students tend to sit down and talk with 
instructors. My advice is to watch or listen to instructors as they teach 
lessons. Meeting with program directors or instructors will tell you little 
about their skills. The best instructors often cannot readily describe what 
they do, or they are self-effacing in their description. The capacity to 
teach is an art as well as a science, and those who do it well often don't 
recognize it and can't explain what they do. You simply have to watch them 
work and draw your own conclusions.

Then too it often happens that the style of one instructor may simply suit 
you better, not because he or she is a better teacher, but because the style 
just fits your personality better. That's another reason why this evaluation 
period is necessary.

I favor rehabilitation programs that rely on the old- fashioned values of 
discipline and hard work. As you learn the skills of blindness, you are 
trying to remake your mind; that is, teaching your brain a new set of skills 
which will develop into habits. This is best done through discipline and 
immersion in those new skills. Professor Peter Drucker somewhat 
sarcastically said it well, "Plans are only good intentions unless they 
immediately degenerate into hard work."

Look for programs that challenge both your physical stamina and mental 
capacity to learn. If your goal is a job once you are trained, it follows 
that you want a program that keeps you actively learning for eight to ten 
hours a day--just as a job does. As a blind person you probably find that 
family members and friends expect little of you.

Furthermore, you may find that the depression that often descends at the 
onset of blindness causes you to slow down. You don't get up early, don't 
get regular physical exercise, and don't consistently challenge yourself. 
You want a program that will help you regain your physical and mental 
discipline. Family and friends, well-intentioned though they may be, have 
perhaps unwittingly helped you withdraw from the daily activities of life. 
The program you choose should push you to re-engage yourself with the 
community and reinvigorate you to face the challenges life has to offer.

You may have other disabilities that limit your ability to work hard or 
engage in a full day's work. Since blindness is often a result of age, this 
too may limit your endurance and capacity to learn. The program you choose 
should accommodate your capacities, but it should not automatically be 
geared to the least common denominator. That is, each student should be 
pushed to his or her fullest capacity, not allowed to work at the pace of 
those with physical or mental limitations. Because many blind people have 
other limitations, some programs reduce expectations for everyone.

You should also look for programs that help you develop confidence by 
teaching you to do things which you may or may not do every day after 
leaving training. Some quick examples should illustrate the point. Students 
should have to prepare a meal for a group of twenty-five or more people. 
They should have to travel in completely new and unusual situations with 
little or no guidance from instructors. Water or snow skiing, rock climbing, 
mountain climbing, and other physically challenging activities are also 
good.

Why? Because these more extreme activities will give you the confidence to 
perform the daily humdrum ones easily and quickly. Your attitude will 
become, "If I can serve a meal to twenty-five people, I can cook dinner for 
my family every day with no trouble." You will say, "If I can walk down to 
the riverfront and find pier 23, I can easily make that new, unfamiliar 
street crossing without difficulty." This is an attitude you're attempting 
to develop.

These activities aren't necessarily realistic in the sense that, as I said, 
you may not perform them every day. But, if you're going to demonstrate to 
overly helpful family members or friends that you can function efficiently 
as a blind person, you'll want to have the confidence that comes from doing 
big or unusual tasks. Men and women in the Armed Forces are pushed to their 
limits in boot camp, not because they are likely to work that hard again 
while in the service, but to give them the confidence that they can do 
whatever it takes in a difficult situation. You too want to gain that same 
confidence.

When you get home with your family, some of your confidence will inevitably 
seep away. The old habits of low self-esteem and limitation will come back 
as family members treat you as they always did. You want to leave the 
program with enough extra confidence that, when a little erodes away, you're 
still substantially ahead of the game. You're not trying to be super blind 
person; you're just doing what it takes to build confidence that can 
withstand outside pressure. If you come home having learned only to do the 
average tasks in the ordinary way, when slippage occurs, you will 
necessarily subside to below normal.

Ninety percent of those reading this letter and considering rehab training 
have some vision. When you evaluate programs, you should observe the way 
they teach people with some vision. First consider the extent to which the 
program emphasizes competitiveness. The skills you will be learning should 
be measured against the standard of what will be competitive on the job, in 
other words, compared with what a sighted person can do.

This issue often arises when considering how those with residual vision 
should read or travel. If you are to be competitive and efficient in today's 
world, you will want to use a combination of techniques that maximizes speed 
and efficiency. The average sighted person reads at about 200 words a 
minute. You will want to aim at that target. Avoid the temptation to choose 
print because you think it makes you look sighted, even when it's much 
slower or less efficient than Braille. The program you choose should help 
you find that combination of techniques which maximizes your skills, not 
your capacity to look sighted. You yourself should be helped by the program 
to face your blindness squarely--not trying to fake sight in order to look 
normal.

The level of illiteracy among those who are legally blind with some vision 
is staggering. Studies show that these people are employed less often and 
have less professional success than people who are totally blind and use 
Braille. Teachers are often tempted to cater to the student's desire to 
avoid appearing blind, so they encourage the use of print at all costs. 
Ultimately you will pay the price for accepting techniques that are slow and 
cumbersome. With work you can learn to read Braille at the same speed that 
the average sighted person reads print. If you choose another technique, it 
should be at least as efficient. If it is not, you won't be competitive in 
school or the job market.

For blind people with some vision, I don't know of any workable teaching 
technique that doesn't involve using sleepshades or a blindfold. You simply 
must learn to develop alternative techniques that don't involve vision. That 
means spending several hours a day doing things without sight. The 
advantages are incredible because, after your alternative skills are 
developed, you can then go on to use your vision in the activities for which 
it is most efficient. You must confront this issue head-on, not avoid doing 
whatever it takes to be competitive. Settling for less will leave you less 
competitive in the work world, less functional in the social world, and more 
frustrated in your personal life.

Another issue to consider is the way a training program handles the 
differences between students with some vision and those with none and their 
interactions with each other. When people come for training, they often have 
very low self-esteem. Whether totally blind or with some vision, students 
believe that they are no longer able to compete in the world. Both groups 
receive the message from sighted people that they lack ability and are 
painfully different.

When these two groups of students are together in a training program, a sad 
symbiosis can result. Those with some vision become the helpers of those 
with none. On field trips the students who can see a bit guide the totally 
blind ones. If something is lost, the person with some vision eagerly 
searches for it rather than encouraging the totally blind person to learn 
the necessary skill. The message to the totally blind person is clear 
although never stated: having some vision is much better than having none. 
The person with residual sight feels gratification at finally being able to 
use vision to help some one. At long last he or she has superior skills to 
somebody. The result is that the totally blind person never learns good 
skills, and the person with some vision gains an unrealistic sense of 
self-importance.

When a totally blind student rooms with someone with a bit of sight, unless 
the program helps him or her think through what is happening, the person 
with residual sight will end up doing most tasks around the apartment 
because it's "easier for me." Never mind that the totally blind person can 
and should learn to vacuum the rugs, do the dishes, and mop the floors as 
well as a sighted person. He or she won't learn these skills unless the 
program helps students recognize the tendency to place a premium on sight 
and view total blindness as necessarily inferior.

The most important thing to remember is that you need to look for and expect 
the best, and the best usually means hard work and acceptance of personal 
responsibility. It also means that your instructors should push you and be 
competent examples of what they teach--helping you learn the problem-solving 
skills you will need as a blind person. You will face much pressure to 
accept mediocrity. Unfortunately this pressure often comes from the agencies 
established to serve you. Fortunately, though, you have many choices and can 
become a self-confident blind person, provided that you are willing to 
reject that which doesn't meet with the highest standards of excellence.

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