Ever Wonder How the Blind Choose Clothes?
In high school, I had a blind english teacher. Miss Weckerly. In all the times I was making her life miserable, I never once thought about telling her “your outfit sucks.” I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me.
I was a rotten kid. She was a really rotten teacher who happened to be blind. The other rebels in class and I tested her every chance we got. As you might expect, she depended on her hearing to give her a clue to inappropriate activities, ie: screwing around. She could detect a moving object at thirty feet – about the size of a classroom.
If she thought there were some shenanigans, she would go charging down a row of desks hoping to intimidate the culprit or get a reaction that she could interpret as monkey-business.
The only thing my friend Brad could get away with regularly was removing her Braille dictionary from the shelves by him, and sit with his eyes closed and try to figure out the little raised bumps.
Eventually however, someone would notice him sitting there as if in a yoga pose, fingers moving slowly across the page, intense concentration marking his face. A silent signal would alert the rest of the class and the smothered laughter would get him in trouble. Miss Weckerly never knew what he was doing.
What made me think of this? This gadget: it reads the color.
Brad would have a great time with it.
@Renato: nah, it’s probably fake – or “concept” as designers like to say. Here’s the source: http://www.ylfdesign.com/
I was wondering if this gadget is real
Renato’s last blog post..DVD
Hmm, reminds me of my husband, except substitute “sofa and wineglass” for “desk”.
I have always worn a lot of black, being from the Northeast and all. For a long time I had to get dressed for work in the dark because Ben and the kids were still asleep, and I can’t count the number of times I ended up in navy tights and a black dress because I was getting dressed blind. Non-matching shoes could be considered a fashion statement if you wanted to stretch a point; I sometimes wear non-matching socks just to be a pain in the ass.
Gretchen’s last blog post..Fail-Safe.
@Gretchen: you have to trust me on this. She belonged in a college where she didn’t have to get out from behind a desk and have anything to do with discipline. As I think about it, I think all she wore was black. Her shoes didn’t match sometimes 🙂
That poor woman. Teenagers, yet. She’d have been better off as an elementary teacher. If I were blind, however, I would totally use it as an excuse to wear dreadful outfits.
Gretchen’s last blog post..Fail-Safe.
@Rhea: yeah, we were pretty brutal, but she ended up at a college (which is where she belonged) and did OK. (My future FIL was the person that hired/fired her.)
It never occurred to me that a high school teacher could be blind. I would hate walking into a classroom full of teenagers without all my faculties intact.