"The system is not working, and we have no obvious solutions" says Dr. Phil Hatlen

Posted by Web Admin. on 12/10/2004 12:58:38 PM.

There are currently 3 replies.

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  1 . Re: "The system is not working, and we have no obvious solutions" says Dr. Phil Hatlen
  Posted by Judi Stotland on 01/11/2005
  
  Phil,
  I appreciated your article and as a parent of a blind child was most aware of the need for and value of social skills acquisition. And I am a real fan of offering opportunites for young people who are blind to be with others and share coping techniques.
  
  However, you left out some very valuable options, which are overlooked if we think that all learning is confined to school sites. This issue is a place for partnering with parents, who can and should be engaged as reinforcers, and as learners of how to introduce such skills experentially rather than as a teaching lesson.
  
  There is also a great opportunity here for using after school activities. It is good to remember that many youngsters have difficulty with social skills, espcailly in pre-adolescence, and many after school activities are designed to teach those skills in the context of "fun" activities. Sports can help, if a child is so inclined and will be allowed in, because implicit in the actiivty is teaching team spirit, etc.
  
  I am particulalry fond of faith-based youth groups and summer camps for teching social skills. The faith part hopefully inclines youth leaders to value including everyone and talking through observed problems with the youngsters. This is an expected place for testing leadership skills and teamwork, very useful in adult life.
  
  I know only too well that peer feedback is painful, but the lessons learned from peer rejection of certain behaviors cause behavioral changes that nothing else can match.
  
  In any case, here is our chance to call on the current powers that be to use their trumpeted "faith based intiatives to supplement," rather than supplant other vital services.
  
  
  

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  2 . Re: "The system is not working, and we have no obvious solutions" says Dr. Phil Hatlen
  Posted by debee on 02/27/2005
  
  * I hope Phil Hatlen will be able to see this public response --
  I attended public school all twelve years, when mainstreaming was still an experiment back
  
  in the early 1960s. I was bused to another district with a resource room, but I was the only
  
  blind child who did not have other disabilities. I spent most of my time in ordinary
  
  classes.
  My parents took social skills very seriously. Blindisms were squelched by the time I was
  
  seven and I joined both scouts and 4-H. I was expected to bring my little sighted friends
  
  home to play. I was not allowed to be with blind children because they were "weird" and
  
  hence a bad influence.
  At recess, other little girls played hop-scotch, tag or tether-ball; I stood forlornly in a
  
  corner of the yard, and waited for it to be over. I was teased, and it hurt, but I don't
  
  remember hurting more than other kids. I do remember that other kids could be very nice to
  
  me but nobody wanted to become my best friend.
  Outwardly, by the time I was in middle school, I appeared successfull. As a teenager, I won
  
  many leadership and youth achievement awards. I was president of my 4-H club and at fifteen
  
  even won a covetted summer job working as a counselor at a camp for sighted children. I was
  
  held up as an example of a blind child who would become a successfull adult.
  But I hated every minute of the social life imposed on me by my parents. Other kids worked
  
  together in study hall, but I couldn't join because I didn't know where they were in their
  
  printed textbooks. I hated bumping in to other naked young women in the locker room, or
  
  trying to find an empty seat in the noisy, crowded cafeteria. Other kids were always
  
  laughing, poking each other and pointing at something I couldn't observe. We had group
  
  songs, and calisthenics, chants and signals, and I was only dimly aware of what I was
  
  supposed to do and couldn't follow the group. I knew most everyone learned new skills by
  
  watching and imitating, and I was painfully aware that I couldn't imitate -- I didn't (and
  
  still to this day) do not know how to do the hokey-pokey because nobody has ever shown me.
  
  I didn't know the latest dances, the newest styles or which boys were cute; I was different
  
  and it never went away!
  My parents were lucky that I was too scared to try drugs and that my addiction to reading
  
  science fiction prevented me from having time to get in to trouble.
  I carried on a secret life of which my parents were unaware. All through middle and high
  
  school I exchanged cassette tapes and Braille letters with thirty-five other teenagers in
  
  schools for the blind across the U.S. I enthralled my correspondents with tales of the
  
  mainstreamed teenage life, while they sustained me with stories of ordinary days at schools
  
  for the blind. In my fantasies I was in that world, where I had close friends like me and
  
  where I belonged. In this world, I didn't have to guess at what was written on the board,
  
  the teachers knew how to teach me sewing, and the kids told me what everyone was laughing
  
  about.
  After graduating, I rebelled and found a way to attend a school for the blind at last. I
  
  became an exchange student and entered the thirteenth grade at the Institute for the Blind
  
  in Marburg Germany.
  Being among other blind people was my dream come true. My parents were right -- some of the
  
  kids were weird, but not everyone. All the kids fully included me, even though with my funny
  
  accent and quaint customs I was a weird american. At the German Institute for the Blind, for
  
  the first time in my life, I did not feel like an outsider. As another blind teen I was more
  
  at home there than I had ever been in american schools.
  When I returned to America I was a different young adult. I had been a unique person at the
  
  school for the blind in a positive way, and it banished all my shyness and fear. I quickly
  
  moved on to college an into my own apartment, and without any parental pressure eagerly
  
  nurtured a wide circle of friends both sighted and blind. Boys fell in love with me, both
  
  blind and sighted and finally, at twenty-one, I was no longer isolated.
  I feel sure I could not have coped enough in public school to have appeared outwardly
  
  well-adjusted if it were not for my secret penpal refuge. And without my insistance on
  
  attending a school for the blind before college, I doubt I would have changed. Without my
  
  parents, I would have withdrawn in to my own world and lived on as a lonely adult.
  Today, two decades later, I have worked as a technical support specialist, computer trainer
  
  for court reporters, a software engineer and a technical writer. Though I still consider
  
  myself an introvert, my performance reviews regularly praise my abilities as a team player
  
  and leader. Yet even now, I can walk into a room of coleagues all pointing excitedly at
  
  something onscreen, or join a group of co-workers hovering over the blueprints to the new
  
  building where our department is moving, and that feeling of terrible isolation sweeps over
  
  me once again. In my mind, I am back in the seventh grade, with the math teacher's endless
  
  chalk scrape scraping across the board, the flutter of notes being passed between
  
  whispering kids in the back row, and I know this is a world for the sighted where I will
  
  never fully belong.
  
  Do I feel this way because my school for the blind experience was only one year, and it
  
  happened after my personality was pretty much formed? I don't know. But I do know that it is
  
  my feeling of belonging with other blind friends that has made it possible for me to make
  
  friends with the sighted. And it is also my occasional feeling of isolation still that makes
  
  me sure Phil Hatlen is right!
  
  

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  3 . Re: "The system is not working, and we have no obvious solutions" says Dr. Phil Hatlen
  Posted by lmackechnie on 03/30/2005
  
  As a Special Education Director, I agree with Dr. Hatlin. We provide both self-contained classrooms and inclusion settings for students within the county where the SC School for the Deaf and the Blind is located. I have seen the improvement in self-esteem of students who can attend classes with other students who are visually impaired and blind. The responses, by new students, are overwhelming to being on the Student Council, being selected to be a cheerleader, member of a goalball team or star in a play. These activities are everyday reality at the school. "In public school settings, these activites are a dream!" said Mary. While some students attend a class in the local high school, they still have other students to have lunch with who are visually impaired or they can choose whatever friends they wish. These students then can participate in the afterschool events on campus at the Schoo for the Blind. One mother said, "I watched my daughter cry one too many times when she was in that other school, as she was never invited to birthday parties, spend the night or other gatherings. Here at SCSDB, she always has a friend to do things with, if she wishes!
  

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