A.Z.  
Wright State University  
Assigned Paper c) 1994

 

A Trip of Discovery

 

It was a cold, dreary day in the middle of December, and a city bus, which a half hour ago had been filled to capacity with passengers of all walks of life, had now already dropped most of its remaining passengers at a crowded shopping mall in a Cincinnati suburb, but I stayed on, wondering just how much longer it will be before I reach my destination.  I was nearing the end of a two-and-a-half hour commute from my home to my old high school on the other side of the city. 

 My trip started at approximately 11:45 that morning when I boarded the number 17 bus that ran from North College Hill, a working class area of town where I currently live with my parents, to downtown Cincinnati.  Then, I walked four blocks through crowded downtown streets congested with professionals walking to and from their lunch breaks, people catching  buses, and last minute Christmas shoppers, to make the number 3 bus to Bethesda North Hospital, the end of the line and the closest the mass transit system came to Sycamore High School.  From there, I arranged for a taxi to pick me up at the bus stop and take me to the school. 

 If all went well, if one of my connecting buses did not break down in this miserably cold December weather or the dispatcher of the taxi company I called did not lose my request for a pick up, both of which have happened to me on trips like this in the past, I would make it to  the high school right about the time the last bell rang at 2:20.  Though it was the most inexpensive way for me to get to the other side of town, it was a long, arduous journey that my parents, to whom I am very close, begged me not to take, but I went because I wanted to see some of my favorite teachers and thank them for making it possible for me to be a social work major at Wright State University. 

 As everyone else on the bus was disembarking to shop in that congested, upper class mall filled with swarms of shoppers, some with screaming children begging their parents to buy them that perfect Christmas gift, some buying the latest new toys and cards for their distant relatives out of state, I suddenly began to reflect on the experiences and memories that I left behind at the other end of this strange odyssey across Cincinnati that I was making in increasingly bitter winter weather.

 

On October 27, 1973, I was born at Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati.  When I was six months old, my mother became concerned that I had a lack of vision because I would often look directly at the sun.  I was diagnosed with optic nerve atrophy in my right eye and astigmatism in my left.  My father had served in Vietnam, and I believe that my visual impairment may be related to his exposure to Agent Orange.  For sometime, doctors told my parents that I would have no usable vision, but my parents refused to believe them. 

 For the first several years of my life, I grew up like a normal, healthy child.  I learned to walk while holding on to a table at nine months and by twenty months, I could walk alone.  I understood language at ten months and could count by three.  My parents were caring, loving people who totally supported my development despite what the doctors were telling them.   

My father worked in the quality control division at 3M in Cincinnati, and my mother was working various jobs.  I remember playing with beer cans and anything else that made noise until my parents could not take it anymore.  In 1976, I began attending summer camp at Stepping Stones, a special camp for disabled children in Cincinnati.  My memories of Stepping Stones primarily revolved around swimming in the pool, being on TV, and exercising on mats and trampolines.

     I went to Stepping Stones for two more summers.  Since I showed problems with my muscle tone and coordination, I began some occupational therapy activities at Stepping Stones. From what I remember, they consisted of exposure to tactual stimuli of different textures.  My hand coordination problems would plague me for ten more years until I began high school, however.

     I attended preschool at a special school for the disabled.  There, I met Missey Hoppe and Bob Boskin, two friends that I would continue to know for the rest of my life who currently attend Wright State with me.  I was a shy, defensive child who refused to learn Braille.  I would scream, cry, and physically resist many activities, but I did learn the alphabet visually and I learned to read print when I was in the first grade.

Elementary school was a difficult time for me and my family. In 1980, the plant where my father worked shut down, and the restaurant where my mother worked went out of business.  For three months, both of my parents were unemployed.  Then, my mother found work at a newly open K mart six miles from the apartment in which we lived.  My father would stay out of work until finding a job on the night crew at that same K mart ten years later. Meanwhile, I remember being socially active and doing well in school one month, and crying, defensive, and withdrawn the next.  I began occupational therapy when I was a first grader to improve my muscular coordination.  This therapy consisted of one-on-one play activities with a physical and occupational therapist hired by the public school district which I attended, a middle-aged lady I called Mrs. Brown. 

I loved to ride on the bolster swing, a short swing used by physical and occupational therapists to improve gross motor coordination, but I stubbornly resisted fine motor skills training which would later be critical in learning many basic daily living skills.  I was also beginning orientation and mobility skills training at my school.  This type of training involves teaching a blind person how to navigate in a number of environments using cues and cognitive processes that do not require vision.  Until I was in junior high, my social skills were sporadic. 

 I was considered a math wizard and could do problems that required long multiplication in my head, but many activities that didn't require numbers would cause me to regress to a fit of crying.  Admittedly, memories of this time in my life still leave me with feelings of guilt and shame for what I feel I put my parents and teachers through and a sense of incredulity that I actually exhibited these behaviors as late as the fall of 1985.  Throughout it all, however, I had the support of my parents, some friends at school, and a few of the most memorable teachers in my life. 

There was my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Ham, who inspired me to do many great things in her class.  I believe it was in her class that I began developing my writing skills, skills crucial in social work practice. I was very active in her class, and I remember doing my first major research project at the end of that year, a report on corn that turned out to be one of the best fourth grade reports Mrs. Ham had ever seen.  She was a caring, energetic teacher who expected the best from her students, and I learned much from her class.  My regressive behavior persisted throughout the fifth and sixth grade, however.

During a particularly severe occurrence of regressive and manipulative behavior in the fall of my sixth grade year, my teachers and parents came to a decision at a conference that things had to drastically change.  I looked back on that final autumn of dependence and narcissistic thinking that others would always do everything for me with a deep sense of regret as the bus I was riding inched its way out of the crowded mall and onto a busy, suburban road, and I heard a faint tapping sound against the window across the aisle from where I sat; it had begun to sleet.

Through behavior modification, I improved my behavior somewhat by the end of my sixth grade year, and that summer, I began participating in a unique summer program for children at the Clovernook Home and School for the Blind, a residential rehabilitation center in Cincinnati.  My mother, the sole support of my family at the time, paid dearly for me to attend.  There, I learned many basic daily living skills such as cleaning, recognition of money, buttoning, using mass transit, travel with the white cane, and eventually, tying my shoe.  I spent three summers at Clovernook, and in that time, I learned most of the daily living skills that currently enable me to pursue an education as a social work major at Wright State.  Learning these skills was a struggle for me, especially in the first and second years I attended.   

Along with being visually impaired, I had problems with manual dexterity which kept me from learning many skills such as shoe tying and buttoning for years.  It was also during this time that I began receiving specialized training at the Cincinnati Association for the Blind on the use of computer equipment.  In my four years of computer training, I learned how to use MS/DOS and several word-processing programs with two speech synthesis software packages commonly used by blind computer users. In short, this summer program turned me from a regressive thirteen-year-old child into a normal adolescent.

My seventh and eighth grade years were a period of coming out for me.  I began making some friends and receiving high marks.  Still the school's human calculator, I joined the math club and participated in some competitive, interscholastic activities.  I became increasingly more self-reliant, and my school environment became more complex.  I used a closed-circuit TV to magnify written materials in my classes, most of which were in one room.  It was a large unit, and whenever I had a class in the room next door to mine, three other students would have to move it.  Now I had six classes and a study hall which I spent with a tutor, and each class was in a different part of the school.  I began having to leave class and go to the school library to take tests and quizzes.  I also began using computers in the eighth grade to type papers in school.  in the beginning of my freshman year of high school, I stopped receiving physical and occupational therapy, and for all intents and purposes, I was a normal, high school student.      

I did well in school and was on the academic team, which was one of the best in southwestern Ohio.  In my sophomore year, I began taking Latin and fell in love with classical studies.  My teacher, Mrs. Ihlendorf, was enthusiastic about her classes.  I joined the Latin club that year.  In the Latin Club, I took part in certamina, contests in which we pitted our knowledge of mythology, Latin grammar, and ancient Roman history against members of other clubs around the Cincinnati and Dayton area.  Also in my sophomore year, I began considering a career in some sort of social services work.  I had taken two courses in legal studies in high school and initially wanted to be a public defender or an advocate for the disabled. 

At the end of my sophomore year, I received a grade point average of 4.0, and that summer, I was nominated to participate in the National Youth Leadership Conference to be held in December, 1990 in Washington, D.C.  In Washington, I took part in a mock congress with other high school students from around the country, sat on the floor of the House of Representatives, sat in on a Senate debate, and saw the Saudi Arabian Embassy, the Supreme Court, and the Arlington National Cemetery.  In February, 1991, I gave a short speech at a town meeting of the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board, which is charged with enforcing the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and that summer, I was responsible for having a computer user's manual formerly inaccessible to the blind and visually impaired read onto tape. 

That same summer, I began tutoring the daughter of a friend of my mothers, an African-American fourth grader, in math and English.  My activities for people with disabilities and other minorities gave me a new appreciation for diversity.  I began to feel that it was my duty to help people who have been oppressed achieve equality and reach their full potential.  Throughout my childhood, I was seen as having superior intelligence, and I began thinking at this time that I had a moral obligation to use that intelligence to help eliminate racism, sexism, ageism, and most of all, discrimination against people with disabilities.  This picture of my life was not entirely rosy, however. 

At times, school was a struggle for me.Some of my teachers did not know how to deal with a student with low vision.  My algebra teachers, for example, would write sample equations on the black board that I could not see.  When I told them this, they told me that they could not teach any other way.  I learned the material from these classes from the book and from parents and tutors.  I received an IBM compatible personal computer for Christmas when I was sixteen, and I became a heavy user of computerized information retrieval services, since there was often no one available to assist me with using the library card catalogs at school.  I also became a skilled networker, relying on tutors, friends, former teachers, school personnel, family, and professionals from around the country with whom I communicated by using my computer to gather materials for class assignments. 

 I graduated from Sycamore High School in Cincinnati with high honors and numerous awards and entered Wright State University as a social work major and a psychology minor, my tuition covered by scholarships and the Ohio Bureau of Vocational Rehabilitation.  I feel that I enter the social work profession with a great ability to empathize with clients and understand how they view their presenting problems.  I am a member of several organizations on campus at Wright State, my grade point average is 3.5, and I enjoy my work at my current mini-practicum site, a center for independent living for the disabled. 

As the bus I rode wound its way through the strip malls and office parks of Cincinnati's affluent northeast side, the area where I spent my childhood, I began thinking of all the people who helped me reach my goals.

 There was Mrs. Ihlendorf, who encouraged my love of Latin and my drive to achieve in school, there was Mr. Riesenberg, who inspired my interest in legal issues, advocacy, and the achievement of equality, and there was Mrs. Klefas, my English teacher in my senior year of high school, who allowed me to appreciate the greatness of English literature and its relevance to modern times.  I would be visiting all three of these teachers at the end of my long, cold journey across Cincinnati, but most of all, I had to thank my parents. 

My mother spent countless nights helping me with my homework and struggled with me through a school system that had not dealt with the issues concerning educating a visually impaired student. She is still a great support to me in college, helping me with major research projects and providing food and other necessities that are difficult for me to find in the vicinity of Wright State University due to lack of transportation. 

 My father also has given me a great deal of encouragement, and during my first quarter at Wright State, he would drive from Cincinnati to take me out to lunch on one of his days off from his job on the night crew at the K mart where my mother works.  As the bus neared the end of the line at Bethesda North Hospital, I began to truly realize the powerful effect that personal support has had on the type of person I am today and the effect that family and other social networks might have on clients in my professional practice.

 At 2:15, I heard and felt the bus stop and asked the driver, "Are we near Bethesda North?"  The driver did not respond.  I repeated my question more emphatically.  The driver mumbled something incoherently.  A middle-aged lady who boarded the bus five minutes before said, "Yes."  As soon as I got off the bus, I heard three, staccato beeps of a horn, the signal that my taxi was waiting.

 My excitement grew as the taxi pulled into Sycamore High School.  It was 2:25, and classes had already ended for the last day before winter break.  I was about to see three teachers whom I had not seen since graduating two and a half years ago.   

"Hello There!  How are you doing!  I haven't seen you in so long.", said Mrs. Klefas.   

"Just great.", I said, "It took me a while to get over here." 

Mrs. Klefas and I talked much about things that had happened to us in the past two and a half years.  She talked about the home coming floats that she helped design and the students in her composition and English literature classes, while I talked of my academic pursuits in social work and my mini-practicum experiences.  Even though I am pursuing my academic career sixty miles away and a world apart from her senior English literature class, I still think of how she taught such a dry subject with great enthusiasm, and occasionally, something in one of my social work classes or my mini-practicum will bring to mind some quotation from Charlotte Bronte or Sir Walter Scott.