9:49pm October 15, 2014

Another FC story: a truly blind facilitator

This one from a mother and daughter I know. They both have Rett syndrome, the mother mild and the daughter severe. The mother was just diagnosed as having autism and a severe intellectual disability growing up, until she learned to write, and later speak. Her daughter will probably never speak but does type using FC.

They have used a lot of ingenious ways of proving that her daughter is really the one doing the typing. But one of them involved having a blind facilitator. As in, the facilitator himself was literally blind and could not see the letter board. They set everything up like usual, to show to a skeptical teacher. Then without telling the facilitator, they flipped the letter board upside down.

The daughter of course continued to type perfectly accurate responses. The facilitator was very confused and somewhat agitated about the whole thing, and kept asking “are you sure you meant to hit that letter?” But she firmly continued to type on her upside down letter board, and the facilitator clearly had no idea she was typing anything other than gibberish. He was able to give her hand the support it needed to type without having to see the letters, because it was her hand he was focused on.

After that incident, the teacher no longer doubted that the daughter was doing her own work. I’ve never doubted it either. Her daughter is highly sensing and has an entire way of communicating that doesn’t involve speech or typing at all. The content of her typing matches the person she comes across as on a sensing level. Hard to explain.

I wish she and her mother would write a book together because they have both done so many interesting things. But too much of their time is taken up by survival. The daughter has severe health issues and many times has had a projected lifespan of months. So working on a book would not be her priority. But I wanted to add this to my #fc tag for those interested in stories about FC, both done right and done horribly wrong, and my thoughts on the matter. I can’t consolidate all those ideas into one post so I keep them all in one tag for those who have expressed an interest in my experiences and opinions.