Back to school

This time of year always reminds me of going back to school and this year, I’m preparing to do just that. I’ve sharpened my pencils, bought some shiny new textbooks and begun training to work as a volunteer on a crisis hotline. It’s the beginning of my adventure retraining as a clinical psychologist.

So far, so good but it has been far tougher than I had anticipated. I knew I might have to dust off the cobwebs having not studied for an awfully long time. I was prepared for the challenge of learning how to learn in a different way now that I can no longer read. And I knew that I would feel ancient compared to my bright-eyed and bushy-tailed classmates.  

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What I hadn’t expected was to keep bumping into my visual impairment so often and so subtly.The whole experience has taken me straight back to those first few nerve-wracking days of ‘big’ school - being the new girl in a new place and not even knowing where my classroom is.

I thought I’d got off to a good start at the first hotline training session but no sooner had I congratulated myself on walking up to the teacher and announcing that I am visually impaired (it still doesn’t roll off the tongue), when I tripped up. I couldn’t see my name badge, sign my name on the register and I had absolutely no idea what it said on the whiteboard under the headline; ‘ Critical Information For All Volunteers’. Next came the ice-breaker which involved reading the date on a quarter dollar coin... and so it went on.

By the end of that first class, I was ready to throw in the towel. I could have wept when everyone else jumped into their cars and sped off into the night while I waited for a train home.

But it has improved immensely since then. I’ve come to the conclusion that all of these minor aggravations are par for the course while I get used to my new situation. I hope that the second and third time they happen, they will simply fade into the background.  

Now I’m half way through the training, I have it down to a tee. I listen to all the presentations ahead of time and rather than feel stupid and incompetent, I allow myself to feel vaguely smug when I know all the answers before the teacher even asks the questions. 

I wish the same could be said for my statistics coursework. That is very much still work in progress...