I wonder. If I could see, would I have been afraid to visit the Chicago public schools Hanni and I went to these past couple weeks? Volunteers drove us to each school we visited, and we were so busy discussing the kids I was about to meet that no one mentioned what the neighborhoods looked like outside the car window. It wasn’t until all three visits were over that I did my research. Turns out we were in neighborhoods I hear about in gut-wrenching stories on Chicago nightly news. Little Village. North Lawndale. East Garfield Park.

Thanks to the generosity of my publisher--Blue Marlin Publications--all the kids who participated in Sit Stay Read went home with a free copy of "Hanni and Beth, Safe & Sound."

At one school, I was told the kids never get to go out for recess. “Gangs,” the teacher told me. “Too dangerous for them to be outside.

Safe inside the schools, the kids were like any others their age. They wanted to know how old Hanni was. They told me stories about older relatives who were losing their sight. One girl raised her hand and said, “I think you’ll like this poem.” It was one of her favorites from the third-grade reading textbook. “I’m going to read it out loud to you.” She did. And she was right. I loved the poem. After I explained how Hanni looks both ways for traffic before she leads me across downtown streets, a third-grader had a question. “Is your dog brave?” he wondered. His question reminded me. We were in a rough neighborhood. This little boy probably knew firsthand how hard it can be to be brave sometimes.

Two of these schools Hanni and I visited participate in a literacy program called Sit Stay Read! (SSR). In order for a school to participate in Sit Stay Read!, 95 percent or more of the students enrolled must qualify for the National School Breakfast program. The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Center for Literacy helped Sit Stay Read! design the program to coordinate with school curriculum — it’s meant to improve children’s reading fluency, encourage them to become successful readers, inspire them to explore the world through books, and help them learn to respect people and animals.

The school we visited in Little Village wasn’t part of the Sit Stay Read! program. There’s a waiting list for schools who’d like to participate. The Little Village school would certainly qualify: Every single kid at that school participates in the National School Breakfast program, which means every single kid at that school is from a very poor family.

Here's just one of the thoughtful, handmade thank-you cards I received from the kids I visited.

My friend Pam teaches science at that school, so I offered to come with Hanni and talk to the kids about the senses. They must have really been listening! Days after my visit a package came in the mail. Each student had carefully glued yarn onto construction paper to create words I could read using my sense of touch. “Thank you, Hanni and Beth” and “It was nice having you.” Feeling the letters reminds me that there’s more to those neighborhoods than gangs and crime. Kids live there, too. Thoughtful kids. Resourceful kids. Sweet kids.

Last Thursday Hanni and I gave a guest lecture for an animal sciences class, and some students came up afterwards to thank me for explaining how Seeing Eye dogs are trained. “I love dogs,” one of them said. “Now I’m thinking maybe I could be a Seeing Eye dog instructor.” You know what? Maybe she could!

From the Seeing Eye Web site:

Staff instructors are full-time employees who hold college degrees from various fields of study and have successfully completed three years of specialized on-the-job training. They relate well to dogs and people and are physically fit, since their jobs are physically demanding and involve working outdoors in all weather. Some of our current instructors came from teaching, business consulting and rehabilitation fields. Some were in the military and worked with dogs before, and many started out as kennel assistants here at The Seeing Eye.

A Seeing Eye trainer demonstrates how dogs learn to negotiate obstacles.

When people ask me about training guide dogs, I always remind them that they won’t just be working with dogs. They’ll be working with people, too. We blind folks are all different ages, and we have all sorts of different backgrounds and experiences behind us. Some of us are newly blind and still adjusting, others have been blind our entire lives. Although some of us might be easy to work with, a lot of us are brats. We test our teacher’s patience.

The Puppy Place (a Web site created by a group of volunteers who raise puppies for guide dog schools) says it well:

Guide Dog trainers must work with a variety of dogs within a given size range. A great deal of walking and upper body strength is required to mold hyper young dogs into responsible workers. In the beginning, when working with dogs alone, this may not seem bad, but soon the apprentice must team dog training with people training. You can’t leash correct your blind student, or give him/her a dirty look and expect the undesired behavior or wrong actions to stop. You must verbally communicate while physically managing to keep up with the dog. Coming out of yourself to work with both dogs and people is a special skill and not one to be taken lightly.

Schools receive literally hundreds of applications a year from people who want to train guide dogs, so even opportunities to become an apprentice are rare. Most guide dog schools do require instructors to do an apprenticeship, and some apprenticeships last as long as four years. From my observation, apprentices work very hard. And from what I hear, salaries are quite low. I have no idea what people are paid once they pass the apprenticeship and become full-fledged instructors. Considering that guide dog schools are non-profit organizations, I would guess the pay is far below what a lot of today’s college educated people expect to earn.

If you’re looking for job satisfaction, though, this kind of work must be pretty dang rewarding! For general information about working for The Seeing Eye, contact:

Human Resources
The Seeing Eye
P.O. Box 375
Morristown, NJ 07963
or email jobs@seeingeye.org.

The kids at the Easter Seals Capper Foundation Kidlink preschool were a great audience. (Photo courtesy of the Topeka Capital-Journal)

A story in the Capital Journal does a beautiful job describing our visit to Topeka last week.

Jim Leiker, president and chief executive officer of Easter Seals Capper Foundation, explained the purpose of Finke’s visit to Kidlink, which is an inclusive
preschool and child care program for children with or without disabilities.

“She has a disability and has lots of challenges,” Leiker said, “and she has lots of goals and dreams, and she’s been able to achieve those. I think that’s a really positive message for the kids.”

The Capital Journal also took a lot of terrific pictures of me, Hanni, and the kids — here’s the gallery.

In addition to visiting the preschool, we were given a tour of the other facilities and did a talk at Capper’s all-staff meeting that day. We had lunch with folks who’d helped sponsor our trip, then gave a keynote at their advisory board dinner that night. It was a lot to pack into one day, but we enjoyed every minute of it. Hanni and I were treated like gold. This was our first trip ever to Kansas, and trust me, it won’t be our last!

One of our many stops during our Topeka visit was speaking to the Easter Seals Capper Foundation Advisory Board. I signed books after the event.

The next morning, Hanni and I climbed way in the back of a shuttle van for a two-hour ride to the Kansas City International airport. Hanni snuggled in so close to my feet that anyone who got on after us had no idea she was there. In Lawrence, we picked up a passenger who seemed, hmm, how to say it. Sketchy? Down on his luck? He’d come to Lawrence in a Greyhound bus from Colorado, needed the ride to KCI to catch another Greyhound bus to some other town.

The shuttle van was pretty full. Reluctant to let this guy sit alongside any of us in back, the driver ushered him to the passenger seat right in front.

Ours was the first stop at the airport. We let the passengers seated in front of us get out first, and then finally I asked Hanni to get up and lead us off the shuttle van. As we exited, the Greyhound rider looked back and said, “Hey! I saw you on TV last night!”

I’d almost forgotten. A couple of TV cameramen had been there the day before, taking video images of our visit with the preschoolers.
I laughed and told him I’d missed the news. “How’d I look?”

“You looked beautiful!”

That made my day. What a snob I’d been, thinking this guy was sketchy. Obviously, He was quite sharp! And hey, he had a good eye, too.

Hey, have I ever mentioned that my husband Mike has a blog, too? Probably not. Because, to be honest with you, Mike’s Reading with Scissors blog is a bit difficult to explain. At least for me it is. It’s kind of visual, and I’m told even if you can see it’s a little difficult to explain.

But not for Micah Maidenberg, the talented editor of the Chicago Journal. Maidenberg’s article about Reading with Scissors this week is spot on.

Equal parts found object, humor and social commentary, Reading with Scissors features scans of advertisements (there are a few obituaries, too) that have caught Knezovich or site collaborator Greg Schafer’s eye. Both say they share a mordant sensibility, antennae that seek out absurdity, goofiness or the plain strange in the ads laced across daily life. There is a laugh-until-you-cry thing happening here.

Maidenberg goes on to explain that Mike and Greg are longtime friends.

Schafer, a flight attendant who lives in Barrington, regularly finds magazines, crossword books and other ephemera during his travels. He flips through what’s left on the planes, saving certain pages. “The job lends itself to time well spent reading,” Schafer said. The best gets sent in big manila envelopes to Knezovich. Knezovich scans the ads, posting one every other day or so.

He sometimes writes a bit of a jab to contextualize the entry, often just a line or two.

While Schafer has been sending Knezovich ads for years, the blog went live in September 2007. Knezovich wanted to experiment with online publishing. About 50 people now hit the blog daily, he said, up from five or six at the launch.

The blog has already gotten attention — and traffic — from Steve Rhodes and his Beachwood Reporter, a terrific Chicago-focused Web site that’s a must-read for Chicagoans. Now it’s caught the eye of the Chicago Journal, and no doubt traffic will double after folks read the entire article. And after they see the stunning photo of Mike Knezovich with his piles of magazine and newspaper clippings? The hits will triple. Quadruple! Do your part and link to Reading with Scissors. WHO knows? Like Mike, you may find Reading with Scissors therapeutic :

“I can pay attention and get utterly depressed, or confused,” Knezovich said. “Or I can find a way to get a laugh out of it.”

The good news: My interview with Dick Gordon on NPR’s The Story aired all over the country last week. The bad news: It didn’t air here in Chicago.

Chicago Public Radio held its pledge drive last week; my interview was bumped so that WBEZ personalities like Ira Glass could cut in and ask listeners to call in and pledge to the station. The nerve! Seriously, Mike and I are members of WBEZ, and I understand why they have to do these pledge drives. But still, I gotta admit…I was disappointed friends and family members in Chicagoland didn’t get a chance to catch me on the radio.

I did hear from people in other parts of the country who heard it, though. A woman in Memphis wrote me to say she’d heard the interview on satellite radio and recognized some of my anecdotes. “I read them in your book!” she said. A man from Las Vegas wrote to tell me he, too, had modeled nude. No mention if he did this for art students, or on the strip.

Mike and I were able to hear the interview online, and I must say, those folks at North Carolina Public Radio did a fabulous job of editing. They took an hour’s worth of tape, condensed it, and came out with a nice little package that makes chronological sense. If you missed hearing the interview on the radio, you can hear it online. Listen to my voice, and to my laughter, and you’ll know what a great job Dick Gordon did setting me at ease in a studio that was halfway across the country from him.