Future Reflections Winter/Spring 2000, Vol. 19 No. 1
Fourteen, blind, and multiply handicapped since
infancy, Kevin knew about letters. Letters excited him in the way angels, UFOs,
ghosts, and monsters excite many of us�lots of excitement, little practical
value.
The Guru�s of Madison Avenue skillfully generate
ungrounded excitement about products so that people will buy, well, just about
anything. With kind intent, Kevin was manipulated in that way. His favorite
television programs, �Sesame Street� and �The Electric Company,� mimicked
Madison Avenue�s methods so as to promote every child�s desire to read.
Kevin was destined either to read Braille, or not read
at all. Yet by 1981, �Braille� for Kevin was a mispronunciation of �fail.� Each
class was preceded by dread, overshadowed by fear, and remembered in confusion,
until, as each class ended, it changed to relief mixed with dread of the next
Braille encounter.
Finally, in December of 1981, after six years of
effort, his teachers abandoned all efforts to teach Braille to Kevin. I shared
my son�s sense of relief. I shared the teacher�s assessment that Braille
literacy was a futile quest for a child as damaged as mine. Yet, a distant part
of me was outraged by the life sentence of illiteracy that was now to be
imposed upon Kevin. The inner accountant in me hesitated before posting cost
and cause to Kevin�s account in the way all had agreed it should be done.
I was a parent, aged 33. Both Kevin and Heather, my
adopted daughter, were multi-handicapped and blind. No fear, no inordinate
concern about blindness gripped me at that late stage. My children were who
they were, and I saw nothing in need of fixing�except, perhaps, the society
that shunned them.
Braille was a different matter, a less familiar thing.
I nursed a parent�s terror of an imagined cult of Braille experts so exotic, so
beyond my experience, that I might harm my son by even approaching Braille
without years of study. But what harm could I do now? The legacy of our attempt
to help Kevin make sense of letters, of Braille, was discarded as junk, left in
a place not to be revisited. I could do no harm. I was free to look around for
answers to questions I�d long contemplated.
�I wondered if
Kevin could at least learn that symbolic languages exist and operate. He might
not read a book, but he could understand how others are able to do it. Many who
have never piloted aircraft nevertheless understand something of how they work.
I cannot lie into existence the story of myself as the outraged parent out to
show the experts! You know the script: �They told me he�d never play the piano
again! Well, I showed them!� Alas and a-lack, �twas not that way. The logic,
opinions, and pessimism heaped on Kevin by experts merely made my own
contribution to his burden less conspicuous.
I searched, but only for a way to help Kevin keep what
he had. I wanted simply to add some garnish, to make his life less confusing to
him. In that winter month, in that frame of mind, I mutilated Christmas toys. Little
building blocks became Braille cells to build words and sentences on the
surfaces of toy boards meant originally to serve as front lawns for little toy
houses and villages. I fashioned my first Tack-Tiles�.
My limited imagination�and even more limited trust in
my child�s skills�left me poorly prepared for the success of my first session
with Kevin and Tack-Tiles�. The session began, I�m sure, with as
much failure as any of his Braille lessons. Yet, if failure�s quantity
revisited him, its quality in that lesson was a stranger to him. In that
lesson, failure meant only that I would deny him the pleasure of confiscating
my Tack-Tiles�, and the opportunity to lodge them onto his own
board. Here, he viewed Braille�s challenge as a contest of human beings and
human enterprises much more to his comfort and liking. That made a profound
difference. He allowed me to tease and fence with him around his knowledge and
ability to use this new learning tool. He was so focused and on-task that I
began to wonder if I was the one who had an attention disorder. The fact that
Kevin�s instructor�his father�had not the beginning of an idea how to proceed,
helped immensely. Kevin and the Tack-Tiles� took complete charge.
Success followed success in the wake of success.
�For reasons
too bizarre to go into here, Kevin was not in school throughout 1982 and 1983.
(The very curious should read Murphy v. Timberlane Regional School District. It
went twice to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, fall 93 and spring 94. The
U.S. Supreme Court denied Timberlane�s petition for a writ of certiorari.)
I had no support from any teacher of the visually
impaired. I grew fearful, this time, of losing what we�d gained. Over Kevin�s
protests, I put the Tack-Tiles� away in mid-1982. He would see them
again in 1985. In 1984, Kevin entered a class made up exclusively of mentally
retarded adolescents, all of whom were sighted. I showed my handmade Tack-Tiles�
to the staff, but my �show & tell� sparked minimal interest. I put Kevin�s
Tack-Tiles� away for another year.
In 1985, a teacher�s aide was hired to work with
Kevin. She had only a high school diploma, but she cared a lot about Kevin. She
telephoned me quite unexpectedly one day. Very frustrated, she said, in effect,
�I�ve been charged to care for this damaged, but in many ways brilliant, young
man, who has nothing in common with his classmates, doesn�t belong in this
class, and desperately needs to be challenged. Please tell me how to help him?�
I invited Robin that weekend to watch a videotape of a
1982 Tack-Tiles� lesson. She left with my handmade set in hand.
After a few successful weeks, she contacted the local itinerant teacher for the
visually impaired. Marina, who�d not seen Kevin since he was four, shared
Robin�s excitement over what Kevin had accomplished. Over the next year, Marina
guided Robin�s efforts, blending Tack-Tiles� with the Mangold
Braille Series, to move Kevin along. He eclipsed the first year of workbooks in
six months. Since Kevin�s Braille instruction was added after Marina�s schedule
was set, one-hour bi-weekly was all Marina could secure for him. Yet Robin�s
innate skill in using Tack-Tiles� kept pace with Kevin�s learning.
Robin left at the end of 1985 to pursue a degree in
special education. None of her successors had any sincere interest in working
with Braille. Marina struggled valiantly, visiting sometimes weekly, year after
year, yielding only when Kevin was summarily ejected from school in 1987, on
his 21st birthday.
Kevin is twenty-six at this writing. He�s at the Florida
Lions Conklin Center for the Multi-Handicapped Blind in Daytona Beach studying
Braille and enjoying the absence of his parents; says he�s not coming home�he�s
probably right. He sent us a letter this week, the first we�ve ever gotten from
him. His name, (two r�s in Murphy), the alphabet (two g�s, no f), and �I love
you.� He knows how to Braille this. His mother, siblings, and I can read it and
write back to him on a Perkins Braille writer. (Somewhere along the way, we
accidentally picked up some Braille.) The silly little things I mutilated so
long ago have now led to the greatest literary discourses my world has ever
known. The ability to process three to four hundred words a minute will never
be Kevin�s; Braille literacy, however, is forever his.
From the
Editor: Kevin, the student described in the article above, is now, at
31, a young man approaching middle age. He lives and works in Daytona Beach,
Florida, with supported living assistance from the Florida Lions Conklin Center
for the Multi-Handicapped Blind. He has his own apartment in a regular
apartment complex, and once a week someone comes over to help him cook and
freeze meals for the coming week.
�The support
also means that if he wants, for example, to go to a restaurant in an area
unfamiliar to him, he can call the Conklin Center and ask the Orientation and
Mobility instructor to help him get oriented. Kevin supports himself (and is
earning Social Security credits) with a packaging and assembly job at Metra
Electronics. He still sends his parents notes
(well, mostly Christmas cards) in Grade 1 Braille. He also uses Grade 1 Braille
labels on all sorts of personal items (C.D.s, tapes, etc.) in his apartment.
Kevin, the father and author of this article, went on to
develop and market the Tack-Tiles� system, which has been sold all
over the country and in 16 foreign nations. For more information about
Tack-Tiles�, contact Kevin Murphy at Tack-Tiles� Braille System, P.O. Box 475, Plaistow, New
Hampshire, 03865; (800) 822-5845; <[email protected]>;
<www.tack-tiles.com>.