No Excuses

Literacy is too important to ignore.

by Nichole Kraft

     Excuses do not fly with Emily Wharton.

     In Minneapolis, Wharton teaches braille skills to between 20 and 40 adults each year—along with a bunch of kids. She works at BLIND, Inc., an organization that helps children, teens, and adults adjust to blindness through learning skills such as home management, mobility, computer, and career preparation. Wharton reports that numerous adult clients have come to her over the years and said, “I can’t learn braille.” However, Wharton insists, “I never want to sell anyone short, and I won’t let them sell themselves short in my class.”

Debunker

     As a braille instructor, Wharton faces the task of constantly debunking the misconception that adults cannot learn braille. “The learning centers of the human brain don’t close up shop at age 18,” she says.

     Born with 20/200 vision, Wharton was not encouraged to learn braille as a child because she could manage to read print with very thick glasses and perfect lighting. But perfect lighting, she discovered, was rare. When she entered college as an English major, she realized how insufficient reading and writing only print was for someone with her vision.

     “I got a poem published in the campus literary magazine and was asked to read at a coffee house,” Wharton says. “I thought I had the poem memorized, but stumbled and tried to look down at the 16-point font on the paper and couldn’t read it because it was too dark. I then decided that I needed to learn braille. I was tired of feeling illiterate.”

     Illiteracy is something that many blind adults face. Fatos Floyd, director of the Nebraska Center for the Blind, says that she’s heard everything from “I’m too old,” to “I’ve worked construction all my life.” To her, none of those reasons are compelling. Floyd has taught hundreds of students to read braille—many of them adults.

Victim

     Floyd herself fell victim to the I’m-too-old excuse earlier in her life. A month after graduating from high school in 1975 Floyd began experiencing splitting headaches. The cause, it was discovered, was a brain tumor. A surgery was scheduled for July, a second for August, and Floyd was scheduled to start at Bosphorus University in her native Turkey in September.

     The first surgery removed the threatening tumor, but had some troubling effects. “I was totally sighted when I entered the operation,” Floyd says, “and came out totally blind.”

     After the surgeries, Floyd realized she needed some new skills. Thus, in the winter of 1975, she sought out a braille tutor. Going into the situation optimistically, she soon confronted reality.

     “Until then, I had learned everything very quickly,” she recalls, “but braille didn’t come to me quickly. I thought I would learn it within a month, but I definitely wasn’t realistic.”

     Perhaps the reason Floyd accepts no excuses from her braille students is that she’s made the excuses herself. Because she didn’t catch on to braille, Floyd became discouraged and gave up. She says, “I made all kinds of excuses for myself. It was just that, up until that point, nothing had challenged me.”

     Throughout her undergraduate education, Floyd got by without braille. She graduated with a double major in psychology and teaching. However, as she contemplated her situation, she knew that something was lacking. “Although I had the best education my country could give to me,” she says, “I was basically a very educated, but illiterate, person—because I couldn’t read and write.”

     That stark realization provided Floyd with the motivation she needed. She, like Wharton, began noting the areas of her life where she could benefit by knowing braille. “I really wanted to read, so that was a motivation,” she says. “My other motivation was playing cards. I love playing cards, so I wanted to learn braille to play cards.”

     Driven by the desire to recapture the joys of her life, Floyd began again to learn braille—this time with the determination she had previously lacked. With the newfound resolve she learned braille in three months. “After four years of making excuses,” she says, “it took me three months!”

It’s All About Motivation

     Motivation is vital in any learning process. What we want to learn, we learn—even if it is fraught with challenges. Wharton has noticed that the extent to which a client learns braille is closely related to that person’s motivation. “It’s just like anything else in life,” she says. “If you think you can, you can. If you think you can’t, you can’t.”

     Often, Wharton explains, adults’ motivation to learn can be squelched through the excuses others make for them. “Most people think they can’t learn braille because someone told them they can’t, or shouldn’t, and they believed it. I don’t want to say attitude is everything, but it’s essential,” she says. “A person still has to make a commitment to working at it and putting it to use on a day-to-day basis, but if they start out believing that they can’t learn Braille, they are going to find a way to make that belief a reality.”

     Like Wharton and Floyd, many people eventually find their own internal motivation to learn Braille despite the misconceptions of others. For many adults, motivation stems from a desire to return their lives to normal.

     “There are many students who come through our doors thinking that their lives are over because they have lost their vision,” says Courtney Goines, public relations manager for the Braille Institute in Los Angeles. “Their primary concern is not whether or not they can learn braille, but whether or not they can continue living their lives.”

     Goines says learning braille reconnects people who have lost their sight with many aspects of life. “Braille literacy is a passport to independence,” she says. “It provides blind people with the same opportunities and access to information as their sighted peers. It levels the playing field for blind people living in the sighted world and gives them the ability to manage their lives efficiently.”

Taking or Avoiding the Challenge

     According to Elizabeth Weisser, a 26-year-old client at the Nebraska Center for the Blind, learning braille as an adult can be frustrating. But rather than avoiding the challenge by making excuses, she says, it’s much better to turn the frustration into constructive energy. Weisser maintains that it all boils down to determination. “If you walked away from everything you started, where would that get you?” she asks. “The first day or week you walk in, it’s going to be scary, it’s going to be tough. People can learn it, it’s just a matter of sticking to it.”

     Weisser says that although excuses may serve as justification for a while, the inability to read and write causes much greater pain in the end. “It’s going to affect every part of your life. It doesn’t matter what you do, you have to learn to read and write,” she says. “I would not want to have to rely on other people to do everyday things.”

     Floyd, echoes Weisser’s opinion. “It’s a choice,” she says. “In my case, I sure wasn’t going to be illiterate. I’m not going to depend on anybody else.”

     Floyd acknowledges the importance of student and teacher working together, with the teacher acting as a source of encouragement. “I think the instructor needs to be the one that motivates,” she says. “We need to give them places where they can use their braille daily. They need to realize the value of braille in their own lives.”

     For Wharton, the personal value of braille inspired her career. She, like Floyd and Weisser, often felt frustrated when she started out. But as her skills improved, “it was an amazingly freeing feeling.”

Freedom

     Wharton says that she wanted to help others feel that freedom for themselves, and she has gone on to teach adults who many people might not consider good candidates for braille literacy.

     “I’ve worked with a woman who had had a stroke which caused her a number of physical problems, but she worked hard and was able to learn,” says Wharton. “I’ve worked with a woman with severe neuropathy and webbed fingers who needed to use jumbo braille double spaced, but she was able to write with a slate and stylus and read what she wrote. I had a friend who lost so many fingers to diabetes that she would read the braille labels on her medication bottles with her tongue.”

     All these people learned Braille, Wharton says, through commitment, determination, and hard work—traits that a person of any age or physical condition can possess. “Some students have some real challenges,” she admits. “There are a number of things that can make learning braille more time consuming or labor intensive, but none of these things necessarily needs to keep a person from learning braille.”

     No, excuses don’t fly with Wharton. “Human beings have an extraordinary capacity for growth and adaptation. The only time it’s too late to learn anything,” she says, “is when you’re dead.”

At the time she wrote this article, Nichole Kraft worked as an intern on the editorial staff of Lifeglow.