This week Judy Roth, one of the writers in my Thursday afternoon memoir-writing class, arranged for Whitney and me to visit the school where her grandson Davin goes to kindergarten. My friend Carol drove us to Francis W. Parker School and agreed to write a guest post about our morning together there.

My morning at Francis W. Parker School

by Carol Dorf

The hands flew up in unison.

When I heard Beth was going to speak to kids at Francis W. Parker School, my hand immediately shot up to ask if I could accompany her. Sure, I wanted to experience Beth interacting with kids, but, truth be told, I really wanted to see what kids who attend one of the most prestigious private schools in Chicago are like. From the school Web site:

Colonel Francis W. Parker, influenced by the educational theories of John Dewey, envisioned a school that held the child at its very center. His fundamental belief was that learning could be fun and proved his point, not by theories on child psychology, but with actual classroom demonstrations. Colonel Parker believed that education included the complete development of an individual — mental, physical, and moral. Through the educational journey, students would develop in to lifelong learners and active, democratic citizens.

Colonel Parker believed that these great citizens must use their knowledge to improve the community– to make things better, more fair and pure. Parker students would graduate, not only with vast knowledge, but also with heart and soul.

Francis W. Parker School was, shall I say, quite lush: carpeted hallways, perfectly appointed decorations on the walls, modern desks, fabric lounge chairs. This was the crème de la crème.

The kindergarteners shuffled into the auditorium, and once they found their seats I could see heads bobbing and stretching to get a look at Beth and Whitney. Some kids were literally on the edges of their seats in anticipation of what would come. They waited patiently as Beth did her shpiel, and then, like mini Arnold Horshack’s, two dozen hands went up.

This was the moment I was waiting for. What questions would these “senior kindergarteners” ask: “How do you know the maid has done a good job if you can’t see?” “Who walks the dog for you?” Yes, I admit I was expecting a bunch of precocious kids asking questions that reflected their seemingly privileged lives. I pre-judged, and boy, was I wrong. What I heard instead was exactly what you’d expect from any 5-year-old:

• How do you write if you can’t see?
• Can you tell what I look like?
• If you can find your wallet, How do you know what’s in there?
• How do you make food?
• When you’re doing art, and you have to pick a color, how do you know what it is, you know, if your dog is color blind?

A big thank you to Beth for allowing me to accompany her that morning. Me and the kids at Frances W. Parker School learned a lot that day.

Many of the writers in the Wednesday memoir-writing class I’ve been leading over the years are retired public school teachers. Mary Finnegan is one of them. Mary is devoted to her brother–in-law who has disabilities, and since retiring she has been volunteering regularly at his group home. Here she is with a guest post.

Unrealistic expectations masked as idealism

by Mary Finnegan

I am a retired music teacher, and when I was teaching in the public schools, students with special needs were often mainstreamed into my music classes with no difficulties. Sometimes I had as many as three dozen students in classrooms where there weren’t enough seats for everyone, but with the help of paraprofessionals, I managed.

From time to time, however, I was required to teach self-contained special education classes alone. A self-contained classroom is a full day class at a regular school that’s just for children with disabilities. It’s usually composed of a small number of children who cannot be educated appropriately in an average classroom, and things didn’t always go well when I had to teach a class like that by myself. In one of the self-contained classes I taught, a special needs student suffered a seizure in my room. Another time I had to block the doorway with my cart to prevent a child with a behavior disorder from bolting from the room and leaving the building, which that child had done in another circumstance. These instances occurred in small class sizes.

I cannot even imagine handling larger class sizes of students with varying disabilities grouped together without the help of a paraprofessional, so I was startled to hear that the Illinois State Board of Education plans to allow local school districts to lift class size restrictions on self-contained special education classes at all levels. And that’s not all:, the number of special needs students placed in general education classrooms would no longer be limited, either, and the requirement to hire paraprofessionals would not apply in all circumstances.

Before she died, my mother-in-law often expressed gratitude for the special teachers who enabled her son to become self-sufficient to the point of managing a job in a sheltered workshop as an adult. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for the teachers who worked with him along with his classmates who had even more severe problems. To ask one person, no matter how well trained, to meet the specific needs of students with varying degrees of mental or physical disabilities without help is unrealistic expectations masked as idealism.

This matter is open for public discussion, and you can link to this email generator to let the State Board know your feelings. You DO NOT have to be a teacher or a paraprofessional to give your opinion. In some of the news articles I’ve recently read, I learned that public opinion will be considered through April 22, 2013. Thanks in advance for expressing your opinion on this matter, and thanks to Beth for allowing me to express mine here on her blog.

If you liked that guest post an engineering student wrote for the Safe & Sound blog last month, you’re gonna love this update on what Ebay and his classmates came up with as ways I can keep track of the colors of my clothes. Freshmen in other Design Thinking and Communication class sections were working on other projects for people with disabilities at the same time, and here are some examples

• A man who uses a wheelchair wanted an easier way to fold up the footrests when it came to transferring into a car or a regular chair
• A man with cerebral palsy was looking for a more efficient way to pull his trousers up on his own
• Occupational therapists asked for a device that might encourage their clients with Parkinson’s disease to do finger exercises on-the-go
• The Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago hoped a class could figure out a way for clients with visual impairments to know how fast (and at what speed) they were walking on exercise treadmills
• a woman who uses a wheelchair and enjoys outdoor concerts was looking for a way to slide from her chair onto the lawn, then get back into her chair again on her own when the concert was over.

Ebay’s engineering class divided into four different groups to tackle my color identification problem, and Whitney and I traveled to a Design Expo at Northwestern Saturday to hear

A poster from the Fantagstic team’s presentation.

all of the students present their completed projects. Sixteen students had visited our apartment in February with prototypes ranging from carabiners to iron-on tags to QR codes that my talking iPhone could read to me, and seeing (okay, touching) what these four teams had come up with in the end made me glad I’d come out of the closet about my wardrobe woes.

Right now I put a safety pin in the tag of anything I own that is black, and a paper clip on anything white. I wear other colors, too, and I memorize what color those other things are by the feel of the clothing. On their February visit, the students watched me go through my closets and asked lots and lotss of questions. In the end all four teams expanded on my tried and true safety-pin method, each team inventing different things to hang from the pin to correspond to the color of the item.

Ebay’s team came up with acrylic shapes on cloth tags called “Fantagstic!” They reasoned that cloth tags would be lightweight, so I could use two or more at a time to identify multi-colored items. The tags another team came up with were laser-cut acrylic shapes called “Depindables”. The tags all the teams came up with had been tested to withstand high temperatures in the washer and dryer. “Tag Team” was the only team to use traditional Braille code on its tags – the other teams learned from research that a majority of people who are visually impaired do not read Braille. Ebay’s team designed its own palettes of shapes (lines, S’s, C-shaped arrows, dots, corners, and triangles) that they’d tested on me earlier to confirm the shapes were easy to feel and differentiate from each other. The “Code of Many Colors” team used small glass beads on the safety pin: one bead means black, two beads mean white, and so on. Judges from engineering firms were on hand to decide on winners for each proposal, and the winner for mine was…drumroll, please…Tag Team!

The winning “Tag Team” team

The Tag Team system is more than a label to safety-pin onto my clothes. It’s also a way to organize my closet and laundry. Tag Team includes a laundry hamper that holds a number of mesh bags, each bag with a tag attached that corresponds with a single color. They figure doing laundry will be easier if I don’t mix all my clothing in the hamper, only to have to resort it all again when the wash cycle is over. “All you do is put your clothes in the bag it belongs in, take the bag out, tighten the string, and throw the bag in the washing machine.”

What about times I’m too lazy to put dirty clothing into the proper mesh bag, you ask? “No worries,” said Tag Team with pride. With the Tag Team system, everything you wear has a tag pinned inside of it. ”Wake up the next morning, feel the tag on the shirt you wore the night before, and you’ll know which bag to put it in in your Tag Team hamper.”

I had to hand it to ‘em. But if you ask me, all the teams at the design expo were winners. These kids are just freshmen, and not only have they learned about design process, but also how much it can mean to work together to help people with unusual, unique, and unmet needs. I was the biggest winner of all, though: I got to work side-by-side with these talented and thoughtful young people, and when design expo was over Saturday afternoon, I walked out with custom-made prototypes of all the tags!

Folks I talked to Saturday from the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University told me they’re looking for new project proposals from people with disabilities and organizations who work with us. If there’s something you need and you live in the Chicago area, I encourage you to submit a proposal soon.

Whitney and I got off the train from Milwaukee Saturday only to turn around and jump in the car with Mike to drive down to Champaign! I spoke to an animal sciences class yesterday morning at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, and Whitney stole the show, of course.

My three-year-old Golden Retriever/Yellow Lab cross has been home with me a year already, and I spoke with the class about how confident and comfortable she seems in her

Whitney chillin’ at home.

work now. After that I went over some of the qualifications necessary to become a guide dog instructor. Most guide dog schools require instructors to have a college degree and then do an apprenticeship, and apprenticeships can last as long as four years. I hope I did a decent enough job explaining how complicated it can be to train dogs, train people, and then make a perfect match between the human and canine — if so, those undergrads walked out of class with a new appreciation of why the apprenticeships last so long.

Once apprentices finish their training and become full-time Seeing Eye Instructors, they’re assigned a string (a group) of dogs and given four months to train that string. Throughout the training, instructors pay close attention to each dog’s pace and pull, and they make careful notes about how each dog deals with distractions, what their energy level is, and all sorts of other characteristics. And then? We blind students fly in from all over North America to be matched — and trained — with a new dog.

Seeing Eye instructors have to be as good at evaluating people as they are evaluating dogs. Our instructors review our applications before we arrive on campus and then ask us tons more questions when we get there. Instructors take us on “Juno” walks (they hold the front of the harness to guide us through all sorts of scenarios to get an idea of how fast we like to walk and how strong of a pull we’ll want from our dog) and then combine all of this information with what they know about their string of dogs, talk it over with fellow instructors and the team supervisor, mix in a little bit of gut instinct, and voila! A match is formed.

Each Seeing Eye instructor trains more dogs than they’ll need for a class. If a dog has a pace, pull, or energy level that doesn’t match with a blind person in the current class, that dog remains on campus with daily walks and care, and perhaps more training, until the next class arrives.

My first dog, a Black Lab named Pandora, was one of those Seeing Eye dogs who went through a second round of training before she was matched with me. Back in 1991, the Seeing Eye knew that the dog they matched me with would be landing in the home of a very unique five-year-old boy named Gus, and that the dog would be in the hands of a woman who had never had a dog before. I’m sure they figured Pandora would need all the extra training she could get!

The Seeing Eye took special pains to train Whitney for me, too. She did a lot of her training in New York City, and if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. Our past week together serves as a great example of Whitney’s versatility: one day she leading me down streets to a St. Patrick’s Day parade in downtown Milwaukee, the next day down crooked brick sidewalks in rustic Urbana, and today, back to work leading me down Michigan Avenue.

Whitney is very game. She is nonplussed by unusual or chaotic predicaments, and her confidence in the city is contagious. None of the dogs are perfect, though. Whitney chewed through yet another leather leash while lying at my feet on the train ride home from Milwaukee. Hard to blame her, I guess. Sitting on the train is boring. She’s a cosmopolitan girl who needs to go, go, go. I just need to check on her more often when we’re sitting still. And always make sure I’m carrying a spare leash.

Quick. How many people do you need for a team at a Braille Game?

Whitney, me and the Braille crew. Photo by Richard Robbins.

Six, of course. One for each dot in a Braille cell.

Whitney and I learned that, among many, many other things, at our very first ever Braille Games competition in Milwaukee last Friday. A story in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel explains:

Teams of students rotated from table to table in a made-up world where Braille is written on money, on pizza boxes and orange juice bottles from the grocery store, on clothes in a department store, on “Go Fish” cards and other games.

Braille Games participants came from schools all over southeast Wisconsin, and all of them had significant visual impairments. As Judy Killian, a Braille teacher from Madison, pointed out in the newspaper article, blindness can be very socially isolating. “After this, they’ll be really enthused,” she told the reporter. “It gets them pretty excited about learning Braille.”

Teams of six spent their morning buzzing from table to table to play Braille bingo, spin a Wheel of Fortune, and spend Braille money on groceries marked with Braille labels. My favorite game was Human Braille Cell, and to help you know how it’s played, here’s a beginner’s understanding of what a Braille cell is made of:

• A Braille cell is six dots arranged in two columns of three dots, just like the number six on a pair of dice.
• To make writing and referencing Braille symbols easier, each dot in the Braille cell has a number.
• Down the left hand side, starting from the top, the dots are numbered 1, 2, 3.
• Down the right hand side, again starting from the top, the dots are numbered 4, 5, 6.

The letter “A” in Braille is only one dot, and it’s the one on the very top of the left hand side, dot one. The letter “L” is a straight line down the lefthand side, dots one, two, and three.

To play Human Braille Cell, each team of six sits in two rows of three. You know, just like the Braille cell. When the emcee calls out “A,” the kid representing Dot One jumps up like a jack-in-the-box. If the emcee calls out “L,” the three kids representing dots one, two, and three all jump up at once. The June Taylor Dancers had nothing on these kids.

Whitney and I didn’t compete, but I’d say we won the best prize of all: we got to meet every kid there! Each one came to our table to have me sign (in Braille, of course) their grand prize for participating: a Braille version of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound to read at home.

A big shout-out to my children’s book publisher, Blue Marlin Publications, and to each of you who have purchased copies of the print version of Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound in the past. Blue Marlin Publications donates a portion of the proceeds from every print book sold to Seedlings Braille Books for Children to help them produce high-quality Braille books for children who can’t read print.