Re: frustrated with blindness (read post if you want context)
Another long post ahead, I didn't intend it to be but my brain ran away.
I'm not sure about my feelings on how much training one should receive from a sighted or blind instructor. Camlorn mentioned it in post 74.
I grew up with mostly sighted instructors, who mostly felt that there was only one way to do things. As a result I still struggle to this day with feelings of "Am I doing this right?' And they're not distant echoes of my past either. My head says "If it works for you and those around you then what does it matter?" but my emotions say otherwise... I get skittish because I'm afraid I look like a klutz, I'm going to get scolded, I'm going to do something stupid because I didn't follow all the steps I was supposed to etc. If I could let go of that and say "I'm going to just try and see what happens," I would be fine. But it's one of those things that's easy to think, and hard to put into practice. It's like jumping into the deep end of a cold swimming pool. No matter how much you know it's going to be cold and unpleasant at least at first, the adrenaline rush still comes when I think about it, and I don't deal well with that. Now if someone pushed me into the pool and I didn't have much control over it, then the adrenaline rush would be focused more on survival and just getting through it, and not on the act of forcing myself to do something I don't know I can handle. Not trying to be overly soppy and dramatic, just trying to think of a way to explain the feelings.
I was never at an NFB camp but I've heard stories. My girlfriend was at one of those, and they made her learn a route, then perform it without any external aid, and she was only allowed to ask for help once. Being the rebel she is, she decided to use the GPS on her phone if she got lost (and she did). She could've gotten expelled for it, according to her, but she wasn't caught.
I'm in two minds about it. On one hand I can sort of see why they didn't want her using the GPS or asking for help, since if you rely on doing that, then you'll never be ready to tackle a situation when none of those things are available. On the other hand, it does bother me that they seemed to be so adamant about it. As I said in my first post, I only started coming to terms with my blindness when I started trying to find ways to integrate with the sighted. So training a route for 6 weeks for the purpose of being able to do it without the GPS just doesn't sit well with me, because sighted people don't do that. Now, if the primary goal was blind people to learn safe street travel, then maybe I could see the point of limiting how much help you can receive, but still, a GPs isn't going to save you from that either. It won't magically orient you or help you cross streets. Hell, when I used my first GPS, it confused me because it would tell me I was facing southeast on an east-west street because of how I/it was turned. At the time, I couldn't cope. So yeah, I don't quite get it, not unless I push my own beliefs aside.
Then there was the time I was getting some instruction navigating my way around college. The instructor I had was as new as could be. She was sighted, and I was among her first clients. She had book smarts, and knew how to provide instruction. But she didn't know how to relate, or how to help when things went wrong, and things often did go wrong with me. She was nice when we weren't doing mobility, but during mobility I was tense. At one point, when I just wasn't getting it after about half an hour, she became frustrated and exclaimed, "I could've done this in training with a blindfold, and you've been blind most of your life, so this should be no problem for you!"
Needless to say I took some offense to this, but I honestly think she didn't mean it to come out that way. I think she was just... puzzled and frustrated. Not at me, but at everything. Like I say, she knew how to train by the book and that was about it. I don't even know if she's still working now.
Funny enough, I didn't become good at mobility until I started getting into FPS games like Shades of Doom, Technoshock, GMA Tank Commander etc. Stuff with maps that you have to figure out. Stuff where walking into walls doesn't hurt, or facing halfway between north and east will at worst get you a bit lost but not stranded in the middle of nowhere. Trying to find my own way to navigate those maps got me more comfortable with directions and things of that nature. I don't know how much better it made me at navigating in the real world, but I felt I could understand orientation better. To this day, I prefer to play those games walking forward i.e. face east, walk forward and sidestep once to pick up the gun, now turn south and walk forward to the door. I mean, I could easily sidestep 20 times down a hallway or just blindly turn and walk toward objects which make sound and still get it done, and on occasion I will, but it's not a regular thing. For me, it helps a lot if I treat it like I'm in a real building.
Come to think of it, if mobility could somehow be made into a game which explained orientation concepts, then I would've been more willing to do it growing up, especially as a teenager. Spend a few months learning orientation in a game where you can't get lost, not really lost anyway. The game could either be an indoor setting with walls and hallways, or outdoors with streets to cross, and heck you could incorporate critical listening to traffic into the game as well to deal with traffic lights, stop signs, 4-way traffic or whatever. The idea would be to simulate a real-world environment but eliminate the pressure and the physical/emotional strain of being vulnerable, at least in the beginning. If some concept gives you trouble, you can practice it, get hit a hundred times and not get hurt. If you really struggle, do a remote session with someone else so they can give you tips in realtime. And hey, doing that virtually would be a lot easier than slapping ambeos on and trying to do a Team Talk session while traveling... Hey it would be amusing and a little sad if someone tried that! But yeah, it could be a learning experience rather than a scary introduction to the big wide scary world.
I don't think we're quite ready to explore that game idea just yet though... I mean nerdy kids like me could hypothetically make it work like I did. But I think to really make it work, you'd need some kind of VR. Something that made you feel like you were there, instead of using a computer keyboard to move a virtual person around. I feel like the disconnect between computer game and real-world would really mess with some people. I don't really have a problem with it most of the time, but some people do, especially if they don't know orientation well yet, or if the games they play follow their own weird rules.
Of course the game idea has downsides. On one hand some people would think the game is pointless. Or they might like tha game, but not be able to connect it to the real world, or believe that a connection just shouldn't be there in the first place, because a game is just a game. On the other hand... some may really like the game, to the point where they lose any sense of underlying danger. Imagine you're an instructor and your student actually enjoys his outdoor travel game and tells you "I made it from dumb avenue to the intersection of stupid and idiot and only got hit once! I must be getting pretty good now, can you show me the route from my house to McDonalds now?"
Granted, that's a silly example. But still. It's fairly easy to feel powerful and or invincible in-game, especially after you get the hang of stuff, and goes back to the argument of "Games shouldn't be violent because it desensitizes people to vilence." I don't buy into that, so by that logic, a mobility game wouldn't have that effect either, but it's something I'd worry about anyway.
To enforce a connection between the game and the real world, you could have two things: variables and modeling. First make tons of variability of traffic patterns, obstacles etc. But make them realistic. Evaluate traffic pattern variations throughout the year and simulate those with some randomness, but not too much (relying on complete randomness is cheap and unrealistic). The street layout should also be based on real-life routes, similar to how flight sims try to be realistic when flying. And hey, you could sort of already do that with GPS maps I think.
So if your mobility instructor tells you he doesn't need to teach you anymore if you can walk yourself home (and mine said that when I got frustrated), you could turn that frustration into a harmless challenge. If you can somehow manage to find the route to your home and get there in the game, you'd at least have the peace of mind that you are, in fact, learning things, even if you're not ready to prove it in the real world just yet.
But maybe I'm just enthusiastic about the game idea because I love 3D fps games. Not the online hack-and-slash ones, but the ones with single-player buildings, maps and action in one package. And sadly, there aren't many of those I can think of at the moment.
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