All The Signs Were There…

The substitute teacher and another teacher at my school worked hard after the class I told her I couldn’t see the book in.  Without mentioning what they were up to to me they put a lot of time and energy into photo copying every single page of the Anne Frank book and enlarging it!  When I was presented with the book in the next class I felt horrible that it didn’t make a difference, but very grateful for the massive effort they put into helping me.  I didn’t know what else to do, but thank her and try to learn as much as I could the same way as I had been since I started school.  By listening.

I realized shortly into the class that this just wasn’t going to work!  Jr. high was nothing like primary and elementary school had been.  In kindergarten when I was learning how to write Mrs. Delaney, our teacher would hold my hand and make the letters with me when I didn’t know how to write them.  In first grade when I couldn’t see what was written on the board for homework my cousin would write it in my mote pad for me.  That was the only thing we had to copy from the board at that age.

When we did math we were given little round plastic counters to use.  I really liked math because it was something I became really good at!  I could use my fingers to count instead of the plastic dots well before most of my classmates and was quite proud of the fact that it came easy to me.  When we started the unit on counting money however things didn’t go so well at all!  I had a lot of trouble with the whole unit, and felt pretty dumb when I had to ask questions.  All of my classmates seemed to know what they were doing, and after asking questions that they just seemed to understand I stayed quiet for the rest of the unit.  I was suppose to be good at math, and it didn’t feel very good when all of a sudden I wasn’t anymore.  I agonized over the unit on telling time so much that I didn’t even feel like going to school anymore.  While everyone was reading every clock they saw, I couldn’t even tell the hour, minute and second hands apart.  I was too ashamed to ask for help because I knew how much the other kids could tease and laugh at anyone who didn’t understand things.  I was also a pretty shy child, so I just kept quiet and tried not to draw attention to myself.

In third grade when we started doing a big project about whales and had to copy things from the board I was moved to the front of the class.  It didn’t really matter that I couldn’t read it, because Mrs. Baggs would read what she was writing out loud anyway.  This worked pretty well throughout the rest of my primary and elementary education.

By fourth grade I was getting into trouble for not doing (or completing) homework.  This is the year my mom stopped sitting down and helping me, and I found a lot of the work to be impossible to do on my own, but I liked the independence and responsibility she was giving me.  By grade six it had become a constant issue as more reading was involved.

When we began using calculators for some work in grade five and six I would punch in the numbers we were told to, but I did all of the math in my head.  I was back to being good at it and enjoyed helping out any of my classmates that sat next to me whenever they needed it.  I also loved to write, because that’s the one thing I didn’t need to see for!  Even if I couldn’t read what I wrote, I could still write whatever I could imagine.

My favorite class was always Phys. Ed. though!  Sure I was a lot slower than the other students in my class, and more clumsy and would always get picked last (or go to the last team to pick by default).  I would get ran into and hit with balls a lot more, but I loved pushing myself to become better even though all my best efforts only ever gave me “B+”’s every single term.  I longed for an “A”, but was still proud of the marks I got because I knew I worked hard to earn them!

I still remember having a parent teacher (and student) meeting with my grade six teacher Mrs. Pike.  She talked about how I was “too particular”  a lot of the time and how it caused me to need extra time to complete assignments.  She was nice enough to give me some extra time when I needed it as I worked on this, but that didn’t hep me transition from elementary to jr. high at all!  This wasn’t anything new.  On every report card I had from kindergarten to grade six there were notes from the teachers about how I was a very “picky” or “fussy” or “particular” student.  I was slow at completing classwork and needed to try harder to complete tasks.  Every teacher seemed to put it down to the same thing.  I was a “very bright” student, but I was just too “particular”.

Jr. high was a pretty big shock for me.  No longer did you get helped along like you use to.  Everyone sat at separate desks, and although most of the teachers did read out what they were writing on the board we were expected to read more on our own and I went from pretty much a straight A student (aside from my “B+”’s in Phys. Ed.) to “B”s and “C”’s with a couple of “A”’s sprinkled in.  I was stressed out and to add to matters in grade eight my hip started causing a lot of trouble.  I would be walking along fine (or as best you can with Cerebral Palsy) and all of a sudden my hip would shift out of it’s socket and my whole leg would give way without warning!  It was worse when I walked down stairs.  There were a lot of stairs in my school, so it involved a lot of crashing head over heels down the staircases.  This didn’t help things at all, but that’s a story for another day…

Getting back to the Anne Frank book.  I told the teacher I still couldn’t read it, and thanked her profusely for all of the work it took to do the photocopying.  She understood, and didn’t seem to mind that she wasted so much of her time, although she still wasn’t entirely sure how to handle the situation.  From then on we took turns reading sections of the book aloud.

When I got home one evening my mom said that she had a phone call from my teacher.  I immediately thought I was in some kind of trouble, although I couldn’t imagine for what!  She said that it was the substitute teacher (we had her for a long time because our teacher was out for surgery) and that she wanted to know if it was OK to have the Itinerant teacher for low vision students come to the school to see me.  My mom agreed, and that week he showed up at the school and I was taken out of class and to the computer lab downstairs so he could test my vision.

He couldn’t get a result with any of the things he had brought with him…