In many of my seminary classes, things were presented in charts. Obviously, I needed to find a different way of handling this information; for though I am skilled at handling charts, most charts don’t convert well to braille, and I didn’t have ready access to braille in seminary. I spent a fair amount of time reformatting things so that I could access them via the computer. I often asked myself questions about relationships between pieces of information, the goals I had in putting things together in certain ways, etc. Did I need to understand material so that I could use it personally, or did I need to be able to present it visually to other people so that they could understand it? These questions stretched me and forced me to learn to understand other people’s learning styles in comparison to my own.
To some people, the idea that I would work to understand other people’s learning styles might seem amazing. For me, it is part of the natural process of adapting to life with blindness. During my early childhood years, my parents did not have many resources available to assist them in teaching me how to do things; so they used their own creativity. They explained things in the best way they knew how, helping me to understand their own point of view so that I could build my own. Because of this, learning to take the perspective of other people is m=normal for me.
I became a natural tutor during my later childhood years, helping a younger student who was beginning to learn braille. Much later, during my high school years, I offered help to classmates with algebra. In college, I studied elementary and special education for a time, spending one semester as an intern in a classroom for students with learning disabilities and another in a classroom for students learning English as a second language. I loved teaching, but I found the elementary school environment chaotic and confusing. I returned to my love of teaching later, when I was in seminary.
Often sighted people assume that visual learning is the norm. However, I have met a number of sighted people who do not learn visually. I developed a great compassion for sighted people who could not process information from complex charts that were used to organize things that could often be presented in numerous other ways.
When I tutored Greek, I developed alternative presentations so that students could turn to individual verb paradigms instead of scanning across a page or piecing them together from stems and endings. For the professor, who is a visual learner, my alternative method was cumbersome; but for students who were not visual learners, they were refreshing. The students had been attempting to copy notes word-for-word and had been struggling with disorganized messes of notes. Twenty-four pages of individual paradigms were better than a mess of disorganization.
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