The Contracted Braille class is twenty-five units long. I’ve just managed to submit my assignment at the end of unit seven. There is a lot more to learn and I had to back off on the class for a while because I was having a hard time processing efficiently the braille I had already learned. I could translate it, but not really “read” it. I could go through with a pencil and put each letter or symbol above the braille character, referring to my reference sheets frequently to get things correct. But it wasn’t really reading.
There was another factor in play that I rather hate telling you: I failed an assignment. I’ll show you what I mean below. Translating braille to print is pretty easy. We can use cues from the context of the word or sentence to figure out what’s being said. Translating print to braille—correctly, with no mistakes—is a whole other matter. And my teacher is strict.
I forgot several capitalization indicators, reversed some ‘r’ and ‘w’ symbols and left off the number indicator before two numbers. I got a lot—almost all—of the assignment correct, but a few mistakes and I’m below 80% and, well, fail. Or in the case of this course, with is voluntary and has no actual final grade, I just have to start over and try again.
But it bothered me. Braille is hard with it gets filled with contractions. Fortunately, and with great timing, my daughter is about the same level in her study as I am in mine. And my daughter does a lot of work at school. I read hundreds of pages of her work, vocabulary work, math sheets, instructions, stories, poems—anything they could send home that she worked on, I read. And it got easier.
I can read braille now without translating character for character. I can go through a stack of braille pages fairly quickly, or at least I can at the level we’re at with the contractions we’ve learned so far.
Today I submitted the final assignment for unit seven for my course. Here’s what it looks like and why ten simple sentences can be tricky and a few mistakes can be easy to make:
That was the assignment. Here’s my marked up version of the sentences with each area in yellow a contraction and other notation to remember additional braille characters needed to identify things like numbers and capitals:
And here’s the final braille, which still looks like a whole lot of dots to me unless I take the time to start at the beginning and don’t lose my place. Losing your place in a page of braille is no fun,
I reviewed the work several times. I wonder how many mistakes I made that I passed over and didn’t see. I’ll find out in a few days.
The Big Boy Update: My son had a rough day at school yesterday, well and this week. His teacher is calling in a half-hour to talk to us. She’s stepping in for several weeks as his primary teacher’s father died and she’s out of town. His teacher is the one he had (and loved) from last year. We’ll update her and see if she has any ideas.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter’s taxi driver this morning told us she would have to pick my daughter up a full fifty minutes earlier than she normally did because of a change in passengers. My husband thinks he’s going to drive her in on Mondays if the schedule doesn’t change. An hour and forty-five minutes is too long in a cab in the morning.
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