by Verne R. Sanford
I used to kid my university students, "If I pass you somewhere on campus and act like I've never seen you before, it's because I've never seen you before!" They laughed with me. From the first day, when I walked into the classroom tapping my white cane, they understood that I could not see their faces. They didn't mind, and I was grateful. I wasn't totally blind. The U.S. government classified me as legally blind, but I still couldn't see their faces.
My mind wandered as I sat there listening to them write their final exams. Technology was forcing me out; I was unable to operate an in-class, "rolling" computer, nor could I see the information it projected onto a large screen in front of the classroom. At the end of the semester, I would retire from a long teaching career. It had been a fabulous ride! I had gone through all of the usual faculty ranks, from instructor to my present position as professor of mathematics.
I mused about the myriad of people who had helped me along the way. I had greatly needed their help. I was courteous but very determined when it came to asking for help. It struck me that someday, in my old age, I wouldn't shrink from asking for help. I'd been asking for too many years to be self-conscious anymore. It wasn't always so simple. For years I had struggled to understand my visual problem and learn to cope with it.
Of necessity, at a very young age I became a good listener, an attribute that proved to be invaluable in the field of teaching. I found grade school to be easy, especially when teachers spoke what they were writing on the blackboard. My mother, God bless her, with only an eighth-grade education, read nearly all of my assignments to me, and I listened. Did I ever listen! High school was more difficult, with longer assignments and much more reading. Mom kept reading and I kept listening! I was able to graduate with my class, an exciting day for me. I recalled my poor grades of Cs and Ds in high school math, certainly not the preparation I needed for teaching college mathematics.
"Get a good education," my father told me over and over again. "Many jobs will be closed to you, so get as much education as you possibly can." My father had graduated from high school and attended a small community college for only six weeks before he had to withdraw and find a paying job.
I took my father's advice and completed a bachelor's degree, two master's degrees and a Ph.D. My academic studies and classroom teaching, as well as my daily life, were an endless, challenging process of adaptations. Good listening habits substituted for required reading. As technology advanced, my state vocational rehabilitation service provided a hand calculator and computer monitor with synthesized speech. A closed-circuit television enlarger helped me prepare lessons, grade papers, read mail and the like. Family members, friends and colleagues often read things to me when I was away from my enlarger. Eyeglasses with strong magnification permitted me to write assignments, examinations, reports, personal checks, and grade papers, as long as each of those things was held one inch from my glasses! Years ago I had used a jeweler's lens for reading tiny subscripts and exponents.
Writing had always been straightforward; reading what I had written was often very difficult or even impossible. I tried grocer's grease pencils, crayons, carpenter's pencils and, later, wide felt markers, so I could write abnormally large characters. I inscribed book pages with large black page numbers, and various words or symbols written in strategic places, allowing me to more easily use a textbook in front of a class. I asked my students not only to raise their hands with a question in mind, but to wave their hands from side to side. They helped me locate equations I had "lost" somewhere on the blackboard. And I asked them to stop me in the halls or elsewhere on campus, because I really wouldn't recognize them. Their cooperation in all ways was phenomenal. Without the generous assistance of my students, colleagues, family members, townspeople, everyone around me, I know the success I've enjoyed in my teaching career and in my life would have been so much less. How do I properly thank them?
I've heard it said that teaching is a noble task. But how can I tell? Nobleness surely would appear on the faces of those being taught, and my students don't have faces! Might nobleness have been shared in some way? I helped them with their mathematics, they helped me see. If they've gone out to help others, my teaching has been a great success.
You must excuse me now, the exam time has elapsed. I must enlarge what they have written, squint to grade it, turn in their grades and then retire. I'll miss my teaching, my colleagues, and the students I've taught. I will always wonder what they looked like.