Going to School part 1

Well been off topic a little lately so I thought I'd write more about SD. I went to regular schools throughout my life. Did I struggle? Not really. I would say I've been lucky enough to be blessed with good logic and was taught very good math fundementals at a young age which made my life a whole lot easier. But for the most part my marks were consider above average.

Its not to say I didn't have help. Ever since I was diagonosed with Stargardt's I was assigned a "speical teacher/counsellor" to meet with me every few months and made sure I was doidng ok and any request I had for accomadations were being met to the best of their ability. Although there wasn't much to do, the greatest help I got was having large print math textbooks. That made my life so much easier.

The biggest Challenge...
I think teh biggest challenge for me was reading. IT wasn't that I couldn't read, butit took a long time for me to read. Since I can't see that well, it takes me an extra few milasecond to look at a word and read word by word. Scanning text is almsot impossible for me. That's why I always dreaded reading novels, and to this day I still don't have much patience for reading novels.

It wasn't jsut reading that was troublesome, seeing the chalkboard and notetaking was difficult. My mom even helped me copy my notesandd I had those special paper that wrote two copies at once so when my friend copied notes from the blackboard she was writing for me as well.

Cursive writing, or script has always been a vice to me. Even to this day, it takes an extra effort for me to read. If the person's writing is nto clear, it would take me long time to "deciper" it. And even now, I write in print for ease of reading.

Visaul Aids,
I had quite alot of things to help me. Before the time to computers, and video magnifiers, I had a handheld magnifier, a monocular, a CCTv, speical dark line single paged notebooks, those dual page paper,all of which made my life a whole lot easier. I wrote notes and everythign in black ink pen because it was easier to read. Sometimes I would receive photocopy notes, or even enlarged music score for my instrument music. Although with al lthe aids in the world, the first thing ou need to learn is to have patience since it usally does take longer for us to work on a project or anything.

To Be Continued..