When it comes to reading and writing, Emma Lowell’s fingers lead the way.
Lowell is an eighth-grader at Sangaree Middle. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday she has a 40-minute meetup with special services teacher, Michelle Howard.
To start reading, Lowell positions her hands out in front of her, palms down, with her two index fingers locked together, and she slowly moves them across the paper, reading aloud to Howard, who is sitting at a nearby desk.
Lowell reads aloud everything her fingers feel – the words, and any punctuation included in a sentence.
“Quote, ’This is the best party our club has ever put on!’ – exclamation, ending quote,” Lowell slowly reads to Howard, who is grinning from her chair and quietly doing a little happy dance to herself as she encourages Lowell to keep reading.
If Lowell gets stuck on a word or a punctuation mark, Howard is quick to help her out and then praise her when she gets it right. Lowell always replies with a cheerful “Thanks!” as she keeps going.
Braille is a system of raised dots that can be read with the fingers by people who are blind or have low vision. Louis Braille invented the braille writing/reading system in the 1800s.
Lowell was a little nervous about learning braille a few years ago, but she has come a long way with the help of Howard, who is a teacher for the visually impaired in Berkeley County School District.
January happens to be National Braille Literacy Month, a time to celebrate Louis Braille’s achievements in developing braille, something that both Howard and Lowell can confirm is a necessary – and kind of cool – way of communicating.
Lowell and Howard
Howard was a teacher at Cane Bay High when she got a new child in her math class who was legally blind. Howard needed help figuring out how to teach him, so she reached out to the school district’s teacher of the visually impaired, who started working with the student during his math lessons.
That teacher also informed Howard of a braille class being led by the local library. Howard took the braille class and fell in love with it. She was at the point of her career where she was about to go back to school to get a master’s degree, but was not yet sure what specifically she wanted to study up until that point. After taking braille, she decided to get her Master’s in Special Education for Visual Impairment at USC Upstate.
Howard now serves 29 schools in Berkeley County School District as a Teacher of the Visually Impaired. On average, she visits four schools a day, and she currently works with 26 students with varying levels of visual impairment.
Howard does not read braille with her fingers but reads it visually.
“Braille’s just cool in general,” Howard said. “It’s my favorite thing to teach. It’s never the same day twice. You always learn something new…it’s fun and it’s always cool because people are always like, ‘oh, you can read braille?’”
At this point, Howard cannot picture going back and teaching in a traditional classroom.
“I enjoy going and seeing each of my kiddos,” she said. “I’m one on one with all of them. Just having that interaction and that relationship with their parents is great.”
Lowell grew up in the Sangaree community; she attended the elementary and intermediate schools before coming to Sangaree Middle – and she loves it.
“There’s lots of good teachers here,” she said. “I really love them a lot. They ask questions and they figure out the best way for me to learn.”
Howard started working with Lowell when the latter came to her as a kindergartner, so Howard has known her for eight years now.
“Being able to see her grow from kindergarten to eighth grade, and just the skills she’s picked up and the knowledge she’s picked up – it’s great,” Howard said.
Lowell also enjoys working with Howard and “just getting to meet her and to learn about her, and her getting to know about me.” Lowell actually refers to her as “Ms. Michelle” (which is what all her students call her).
Braille literacy
Lowell was a little hesitant to learn braille at first, but it was around the summer after fourth-grade when she lost a good amount of her vision, so she started her fifth-grade year ready to jump on it.
Lowell has been using a braille typewriter, called a brailler, consistently for about three years now. She said it was hard at first, but then it got easier.
“She is working on being more independent and making sure that she’s proofreading what she’s writing,” Howard said.
Lowell heavily relies on her sharp memory to help her learn.
“You don’t need a picture, or read something, to remember (it),” Lowell said. “You’ll just know. It just sticks to your mind.”
According to the Perkins School for the Blind website, the development of the braillewriter in the 1890s was a game-changer to help the blind or visually impaired communicate through the written word. In the 1930s, the American Foundation for the Blind produced a better braillewriter in partnership with typewriter manufacturer L.C. Smith. An English immigrant named David Abraham introduced an even better version in the 1940s.
A brailler does not fully resemble a regular typewriter; it has only nine keys, including a space bar, a backspace key and a paper advance/line feed key. The six main keys are numbered to correspond with the six raised dots that make up a braille cell. Since most braille symbols contain more than a single dot, all or any of the braillewriter keys can be pushed at the same time.
The rollers that hold and advance the paper have grooves designed to avoid crushing the raised dots as the braillewriter is being used.
When Lowell recently met with Howard for one of their sessions, the first thing she did was a writing prompt on the brailler inside Howard’s office at Sangaree Middle; Howard asked her to write five sentences about her weekend. Afterward, Lowell practiced reading aloud (check out video).
Lowell knows most literary braille and also knows some Nemeth (math and science). There is also computer, music and foreign language braille. Foreign language braille will be one that she learns when she is in high school and needs to acquire the foreign language requirement.
The two most common forms of English braille are contracted and uncontracted braille; Lowell works with contracted. She can create each letter on the brailler, but there are also contractions involved. For example, when she wrote out the word “the," she did not fully spell it out, she actually created a formation of the dots that stand for “the.”
Another example is the word “bone.” For Lowell, it is spelt kind of like a “b” plus the symbol for “one.” The braille alphabet is longer than the English alphabet because of all the contractions.
“Emma has come so far,” Howard said, adding, “She picked up the alphabet super quick, and then we started learning the whole-word contractions.”
Lowell does not know all of the contractions yet – “but she’s getting there,” Howard said. “We’re very, very close.”
Howard plans to continue to work with Lowell as she enters high school. Howard eventually wants Lowell to learn how to operate and navigate a refreshable braille display, which is a tactile device that electronically raises and lowers pins in different combinations to display braille characters.
“I am hoping that she will be able to navigate textbooks and tactile graphics on her own as far as reading and writing skills,” she said.
Fun with dates
Lowell plays Miracle League Baseball and her most recent team’s color is royal blue, which just happens to be the same color as the ribbon for Alström syndrome.
She is very crafty and enjoys art and chorus, but her favorite subject is science – she really loved learning biology last year in Debra Vance’s science class.
“We had so much to learn and so much to have fun with,” she said, adding that she did her own research on the subject even outside of school. “I wanted to learn more about the world and even more about my life, and when I grow up, I want to be a physical therapist.”
Lowell said she and her parents have pondered if there will be a sort of computer microchip developed in the future that will help blind people see again – but Lowell is less concerned about herself and wants this more for other people.
“If they were to make a cure for it, I would want it to be for everybody else,” she said.
Her aforementioned sharp memory is no joke, and her favorite things to remember are dates. As an avid Disney fan, Lowell knows that this year the Walt Disney Company will celebrate 100 years in operation. Her favorite Disney movie is “Hocus Pocus” and she is happy to share that the first movie came out in 1993 and therefore, the movie franchise turns 30 this year. She also just happens to know that New Year’s Day in 2040 is going to be on a Sunday and New Year’s Day 2050 will be on a Saturday.
Lowell can also recall that Louis Braille was born in 1809 and that Jan. 4 is World Braille Day – “and it’s also Louis Braille’s birthday,” she said.
For Lowell, it is definitely a time to celebrate Louis Braille’s achievements.
“To this day, I thank him – we still have braille,” Lowell said.