Mar 14 2009
Beginning Braille
So I’m taking classes that will allow me to add an endorsement to my teaching license in blindness/visual impairment. I was fortunate enough to get into a program funded by a grant so all of my 24 credit hours are paid for–without a penny out of my pocket. I don’t feel passionately about working with students who are blind or visually impaired the way I do about teaching deaf kids, but that’s okay. I do feel pretty passionately about deaf kids with additional disabilities, and that includes vision issues, so I am excited about taking these classes and learning new things.
Most of our classes are held by telephone conference twice each week, but today we had our first in-person meeting at the university. My professor himself is blind, so in addition to his extensive credentials, he has an authentic perspective on the subject matter he’s teaching us. It was cool to meet him and my classmates so now I have faces to connect to the voices on the phone.
But the day was not exactly smooth and easy! First of all, I overslept a bit: I woke up at 6:55 and was supposed to be meeting two friends at 7:15 to make the 2-1/2 hour drive to the university together. Oops! So I hurried to get ready, and we were able to hit the highway about 7:45. Not bad in Boone Standard Time! We actually arrived before 10:00 when class was to start and found the building where our class was to be held. But…the doors were locked. We searched for an open door and found our other classmates, minus one, who were also locked out of the building. The one person who had managed to get into the building finally came to let the rest of us in, and we made our way to the classroom around 10:15 at least…but there was no professor. A few minutes later, Dr. M’s grad assistant led him in. Surprisingly, he did not apologize for his own tardiness (we later found out that he had been locked out of the building too) but quickly ran through introductions and dived into our first lessons in Braille writing.
After Dr. M’s explanation and demonstration of loading paper into the Perkins Brailler, we each got a turn. The Brailler is basically a Braille typewriter, a machine with just nine keys: six keys that punch the dots, a space bar, a back space key, and a line-space up key. This is deceptively simple. After learning to load the paper in the Brailler, we delved into learning about the configurations of six dots that form the 26 letters of the alphabet, ordinal numbers (0-9), capitalization, and punctuation. The six-dot configurations are formed within what’s called a cell. And that’s juuuuust the beginning.
There are TONS of rules to Braille. And they change. For example, the dot configurations that represent the letters A-J also represent the numerals 0-9 IF preceded by the number sign–another dot configuration. The rules for use of the number sign depend on whether the numbers are in a set, are separated by a space, continue onto a new line following a comma or a hyphen… Well, I’m not looking at my notes, so I can’t quite remember all the if-thens. I won’t even get into the rules for punctuation. Whew.
But letters and numbers and the rules governing them are nothing compared to contractions. Grade 1 Braille is reading/writing letter-for-letter; the next step is Grade 2, which uses a system of abbreviations called contractions. Since Braille in general is very bulky, the contractions help conserve space in Braille writing. But they also make learning Braille much more complicated! Each letter of the alphabet, standing alone, represents a whole word. For example, “b” means “but” and “h” means “have.” A, I, and O are exceptions since “a” and “I” are already words on their own, and “o” is essentially the same as “oh.” That means 23 letter-word representations to memorize.
There are also whole-word and partial-word contractions. For instance, the words and, the, for, with, and of each have a single symbol to represent them. According to another set of rules, these whole-word contractions can be used alone and within longer words, so that the name “Andy” can be formed in just two cells using the dot configuration for “and” plus ”y”. There are also contractions for letter combinations such as “ch” or “st”–and I think these are partial-word contractions (not looking at my notes…I’ve got some studying to do!).
By 3:30, our heads were swimming with those six little dots. We left with 10 sheets of paper for our Braillers so that we can get busy with our homework exercises. In just over four hours, I learned more today than I have in the past three months, I think! But this is just the tip of the iceberg–only our first class of Braille I. We have the whole rest of this course to cover, and then there will be Braille II. I’m taking a deep breath and focusing on how cool it will be when I can add reading and writing Braille to my resume.
