When I was in elementary school I used to get to help at the school next door. This was when students with special needs were placed in a separate school. Me, the good ole' smart girl, the one who finished my work early - with few mistakes - and always needed more got to go next door to the school and work with deaf students and blind students. I learned sign language; I learned braille.
It was that experience that made me want to teach the deaf when I grew up.
I headed to college, took my undergraduate classes, took sign language classes, all the time knowing I would be a teacher of the deaf. I took a job teaching second grade, knowing someday I would be teaching the deaf. After several years I moved onto teaching fourth grade, knowing someday I would be teaching the deaf. I moved to a position outside the classroom, thinking someday I might teach the deaf.
And now here I am, forty years later since that first thought of what I wanted to be when I grew up and twenty years since I started teaching. I've just recently come to the realization that I won't be teaching the deaf.
But I found a way to bring things full circle and make sure I don't give up on my dream completely.
The Idaho Commission for the Libraries was looking for volunteers for their talking book program. This is a program where written materials are recorded and then distributed to the blind, kind of like a book on tape program.
So today I had my first interview. Being I'm totally inexperienced in a recording booth I'm going to be working my way up the ranks. I will start by editing the recorded materials for a few weeks (or months). Then I get to move up and work with the narrator, editing their spoken word as they go. And then, and only then - and after a voice "audition" - will I be in that booth. Alone in front of the microphone.
Narrating books for the blind.
It might not be teaching the deaf, but I can sure live with it. As close to a dream come true as I will probably ever get. Makes me want to work even harder to get to that booth!
Today's unrelated pic is another quilt top I'm working on for charity. (Obviously for a girl.)
