Dick and Jane

Dick and Jane

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DICK AND JANE... AND BARBARA

by Barbara Pierce

The story you are about to read is true.
Unfortunately you could change the names, dates, times, and places, tell it over and over
again, and it would still be true. We as blind people have enough real problems to deal
with without having to continue to endure the needless illiteracy forced upon us by the
failure to teach us Braille when we are children.

If you sense in my words something less than my
usual good cheer and optimism, you are right; because the teaching of Braille to blind
children is an area in which our schools have declined over the past decades, rather than
improved. We in the National Federation of the Blind are working to reverse this trend,
and we need your help to do it. In the following story Barbara Pierce lays out the
problem. Here is what she has to say:

Can you remember the intoxication of learning to
read? I can. When I began first grade, the Scott-Foresman primers about the adventures of
Dick, Jane, and Sally were in use, and I still remember the picture of Dick standing on
his head in a pile of leaves, feet kicking in the air, while one of his sisters intoned
the page’s text, "Look at Dick! Funny, funny Dick!"

Had I but known it, those early weeks of first
grade were the high point of my reading career. We gathered around the teacher in reading
groups to sound out the words and falter our way through each page. I was good at it. I
understood the principles of picking out the sound of each letter and shoving them
together rapidly enough to guess at the meaning. The result was that I was in the first
reading group.

My success didn’t last long. By second
semester each page bore many more lines of print, and my mother was forced to work with me
at home after school or before bed to help me keep up. For I was what they called a
low-vision child.

I could see the print with only one eye, and I am
certain that I was legally blind, though no one ever used that word in my hearing. Mother
placed a little lamp close to the page so that I could see as well as possible, but the
letters were still blurred, and I could never get the hang of reading an entire word at
once.

By second grade I was in the second reading
group, and by third grade I had slipped to the third group, despite the lamp now clipped
to the side of my desk. I had to face the truth: I was dumb. I lay awake at night worrying
about the increasing number of spelling workbook exercises left undone because my reading
and writing were too slow to complete them in class.

I still maintained an unbroken string of perfect
spelling tests because my parents drilled me on the spelling lists every week. The tests
were nothing—but the workbook! I fantasized about what it would be like to go to bed
at night and not stare open-eyed into the black prospect of mortification when the truth
about me and my incomplete work eventually came to my parents’ notice.

It happened at the close of the third marking
period, and it came, as such things do, like a bolt from the blue. I had actually brought
home what I thought was a good report card—all A’s and B’s—except for
art, penmanship, and gym, in which I always got C’s.

Everybody knew that I was terrible at those
things because "Barbara’s blind as a bat." But the dreaded unmasking of my
shameful secret in the spelling workbook seemed to me to have remained hidden beneath an A
for yet one more grading period. I handed my mother my report card and ran out to play.

But when my brother and I were called in for
dinner (Dad was out of town at the time), I knew that something was wrong; Mother had been
crying, and she did not sit down to dinner with us. She said that she had a headache.

It soon became apparent that I was the headache.
My report card had betrayed me after all. In all that hard-to-read small print at the
bottom the teacher had given me a U (unsatisfactory) in the puts-forth-best-effort
category, where I was used to getting E’s (excellent) or at least S’s
(satisfactory).

Mother went to school the next day and learned
the horrible truth about me. I was astonished to learn afterward that the relief of having
my shameful secret out in the open actually reduced my burden. True, I had to make up all
the work I had been avoiding because the reading had become too difficult. Play time was
much reduced, and I had to learn all over again how to go to sleep without worrying, but
things were never again as bad.

In the following years we tried magnifying
glasses for my good right eye, and the summer after fourth grade I had to be tutored in an
effort to learn to read with high magnification. In September of fifth grade my new
teacher called on me to read a paragraph in the geography book during the class lesson. I
read like a second grader, and I was mortified.

The teacher never called on me again. By sixth
grade I was hardly using the glasses at all. I was quick to learn as long as I didn’t
have to struggle to make sense of the print, and it was easier on everyone for the teacher
to assign a rapid reader to work with me on in-class reading projects.

Finally, at the close of seventh grade, my
parents faced the painful truth: if I were to have any hope of literacy, I would have to
learn Braille. Print was no longer an option. I worked to learn Braille in a summer of
weekly lessons taught by a woman who used Braille herself, though she admitted that she
was not a good Braille reader.

She assured me that her husband could read
Braille rapidly, but I never heard him or anyone else read Braille efficiently. People
told me it was important to use my Braille and that practice would increase my speed. But
by that point in my education I had already worked out alternative ways of getting my
reading and writing done, and I was no longer eager to crawl down a page of text as we had
done in early elementary school.

I practiced writing Braille with my slate and
stylus because I knew that in college I would need a good way of taking notes in lectures,
but I never made time to learn to read Braille properly.

Now that I am a member of the National Federation
of the Blind, I know hundreds of people who read Braille easily and well. Some of them
could not see print when they were beginning school, so Braille was the only option for
them. But many more could make out print when they were learning to read, even though as
adults they cannot see it.

They were lucky enough to be taught Braille along
with print, and they simply and naturally learned to decide which method would be most
useful for each reading task. As a result they now read Braille at several hundred words a
minute.

I have never regretted learning to read print.
Everyone should know the shapes of print letters, but I will always bitterly regret that I
was not taught Braille as a small child.

Today I am struggling to gain the speed and
accuracy in reading Braille that I should have had by the time I was ten. I have now been
working at it for six years, and my reading speed has tripled, but I must face the fact
that I will probably never read as well as a bright ten-year-old.

Setting aside the fact that the adult brain does
not master new skills as rapidly as does a child’s, I cannot bring myself to practice
reading aloud to my long-suffering family. The time for taking advantage of such an
opportunity is childhood, and I cannot inflict my stumbling reading on my husband.

If my mother could speak to parents who are
facing the dilemma of whether or not to demand that their children learn Braille, she
would urge them to decide in favor of Braille. No matter how clearly a youngster can see
print at the moment, if the vision is fragile or problematic in any way, Braille will
often become invaluable in the future, even if print too continues to be useful.

All young things need space to stretch and grow
within their God-given abilities. Blind children must be given a chance.