Re: Training Centers
@Arqmeister
I completely understand a good rant. I appreciate your apology.
The situation you described for yourself is the ideal one. I myself received such good training growing up that I only went to a training center--not even an NFB one--for three months, and even then, the biggest reason I went was to have a Summer with my long-distance girlfriend. I also agree with your friend that going to schools for the blind can leave one pretty maladjusted when it comes to integrating into society.
NFB centers, though, aren't long-term stays. Training typically lasts 6 to 9 months to complete, and then the person gets back to his or her life. In the case of people born blind or those who went blind while young, this training usually happens immediately before or after college.
By far, however, the lion's share of students at NFB centers are those who went blind later in life and want to re-integrate into society. Perhaps they lost their sight in their 30&#
039;s because of diabetes, or maybe they went blind in their twenties because of an accident. When I worked in Hawaii I had a student who was 72.
I also think you're spot on about the need for social integration. At all 3 NFB centers, students stay off-site in apartments and have to commute to work. In the case of Colorado and Minnesota, this involves taking public transportation. In addition, all 3 centers routinely send their students out on travel and other business routes that, by their very nature, require social integration. Students also spend a lot of time out in the community going to restaurants, clubs, movies, and the like in their off hours.
If we're being completely candid here, I think the biggest thing that can lead to misunderstandings about the NFB and NFB training centers is what you mentioned about teaching people to break out of the box society wants to put them in. In NFB centers, that discussion takes the form of a philosophy class, usually
called seminar, and it caused me no end of headaches when dealing with students and staff alike.
At its best, seminar is a good thing. It's a place where students can discuss how they're feeling about blindness, and it's a place where staff can challenge students in their thinking with questions like "which is more important: the skills of blindness or ones attitude about it?" At its worst, it's a bully-pulpit from which presenters try to beat their narrow world-views into the heads of their listeners.
This is the part where people are going to pound their desks and shout "See? I told you they were terrible!" Sadly, in instances like the latter, I completely understand. But I also know that having a forum for discussing blindness can be an extremely helpful thing. Whenever I had the privilege of leading a seminar, the first thing I always said to students was "There are no wrong answers here. I'm going to try to convince yo
u to see things my way, and I want you to try to sway me to your viewpoint. If, at the end of this discussion, we don't agree, we can still walk away completely cool with one another." I like to think we broke some pretty amazing ground there. We talked about what to do when your families don't accept your new skills, what you should do with sighted people who are being helpful to the point of being rude, how you should deal with professors who aren't accommodating your blindness, the soft and hard ways to deal with discrimination, and so on.
I'm sorry for anyone who has a bad experience at a training center. Deciding to go for training is usually a pretty big step for people, so when it goes sour, it goes really, really sour. I've heard my fair share of horror stories. Keep in mind, though, how these things tend to shake out. Someone goes to a center and has a bad experience. They come to a forum or a mailing list or what have you, and they tell t
he world about it to warn others to avoid that center. These types of discussions often--though not always--devolve into a lot of shouting and condemning. When it comes to good experiences, though, I can honestly say I have never seen a forum or mailing list post about them. What I almost always see in those cases is people writing articles about their great experience--the same articles that later get pointed to as propaganda.
My solution to this imbalance would be to do as we're doing now. Talk with people who have differing views, challenge them on those views, solidify the facts and clear away the misconceptions, and--in the end--make up your own mind.
Thanks for keeping it real.
Ryan
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=167101#p167101
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