Halfway Contracted

I just submitted my fourteenth assignment for the UEB Contracted Braille online course I've been taknig for over a year now.   I'm halfway through the course and will likely be taking it for another year before I've completed it.

I could have been done with the course long ago, but I've intentionally been going slowly through the material.   This does not mean I'm not working on reading and writing braille because I most definitely have.   Thanks to my daughter's teachers, I'm getting lots of practice work sent home all the time.  

For instance, not only are my daughters school assignments sent home without the print filled in over the braille she's typed and the instructions or other words on the worksheets themselves, but they're sending home other things my daughter is workign on as well.   Each unit my daughter does with her VI teacher is sent for me to not only read, but to understand what new contractions my daughter is learning.   Her braillest is sending books for my daughter and any overage items she prints for her.   In short, I not only have lots of materials to read, I almost have too much.

I'm so so on reading braille.   I would have thought by now that I'd be visually whipping through the pages with ease and while I am faster, I'm no speed reader.  Imagine this (for those of you with children, this won't be hard at all).   There is a point when a child is doing well enough at reading that they can figure out and pronounce most words.   At that point they're exciting about reading.   But it's so slow it's hard to follow each sentence because they're moving at such a slow pace.   By the time they get to the end of the sentence, you're not sure what how it started.

I'm not that bad.   I do a bit of scanning ahead, which is impressive in its own way because not that long ago I was having to figure out words one letter at a time.  Throw in conrtactions and it adds to the complexity of the reading.   I'm slow enough that I can't read with intonation or pace that makes reading something aloud go from utterly mind numbing to interesting.

It's getting better, but I have a ways to go.   My "vocabulary" continues to be augmented with each lesson and additional material from my daughter's school.   There are about 180 contractions in Unified English Braille (UEB), the standard my daughter is learning.   Yes, there are other standards, but fortunately my daughter came along at just the right time to be taught the newer and globally preferred standard going forward.   And while the other standards were more like dialects and could be picked up with some additional work, having only one standard is nice.

Every month I learn more and assimmilate it into my braille knowledge.   It's tricky though because think of this: a braille cell (or character)is six dots, two dots wide and three dots high.   There are only so many combinations you can make with six dots.   This means some of the contractions use more than once cell like for instance 'father' is two cells long.  The first cell is just the fifth dot and the second cell is the letter 'f'.   When I see 'dot 5 f' as it's referered to, I read it as 'father.  'Dot 5 m' is 'mother'.    There are a lot of things like this in UEB braille.

There are also overloaded symbols.   The symbol for a colon is only a colon if it's at the end of a word.   If it's at the beginning of a word it's the letters 'con' and if it's in the middle of a word it's the letters 'cc'.  And if you think that's complicated, the rules of when you can or must use certain contractions, punctuations, etc. is fully documented in the 'Rules of UEB' formal standards docuement that's 344 pages long.  

But, that being said, once you get into braille, it's not that bad or complicated.   It begins to hang together with a logic in simplicity that isn't initially apparent.   That big manual is full of examples and exceptions and seeing as I have no plans to become a braille editor, I won't need most of it.   Just as most of us don't write perfect English in our writing, it's enough for our readers to understand what we're saying.   That's where I'm going and it's definitely an achieveable goal.

Here's an example of where I am today.   This is one of the sentences I had to write in braille, using all the contractions, punctuation and rules I'd learned so far:

As a child, I went to that grocery store together with my mother, although today it does not exist.

The braille version looked like the following where anything in italic brackets is a braille cell that represents that character string.  For example, there is a single braille cell that represents the word 'with'.   Some cells are groupings of characters like 'st' or 'er' or 'th'.  

.z a [ch], I w[en]t to t groc[er]y [st]ore tgr [with] my *m, al[th] td x does n exi[st].

Here's what the braille looks like for the sentence:

I think I may have made braille sound complex and daunting, and sometimes it feels like that.   But it still is loads of fun and there is nothing quite like doing things with my daughter where she and I are the only ones that can speak "the same language" and work together in braille.   She likes to make me "worksheets" to test my knowledge and then grade me on how well I do.   She's a strict teacher.

The Big Boy Update:  I have no idea what my son is doing or what to put by way of an update for him.   He is currently at Uncle Jonathan and Aunt Margaret's house playing Zelda.   I hear Jonathan was prepping earlier today by playing Zelda.   Was he catching up to where my son was or making sure he knew more than my son about the game?

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter is apparently having a wonderful time with my parents.   She had two children over the day she got there.   They played cards and I hear a lot of laughter was heard in the room.   My mother had some other visitors over yesterday to see her.   I sent a video both yesterday and today of the dog as she has been missing her more than the rest of her family.