There were two particular teachers at Cherokee Junior High School whose care and attention I received and whose encouragement made those years wonderful for me. Their names are prominent on my list of guardian angels. Mrs. Edith Berkner was my math teacher for both grades 7 and 8. She was a twenty-three-year-old beginning teacher, and she confessed later to me and my family how terrified she was to learn, from Mr. Bookhardt, the principal, that she'd be getting the blind kid in her class. Even though Mrs. Watson surely must have been consulted and must have reassured the teachers that I could manage, still, in those very preliminary days of mainstreaming disabled students, everybody was understandably nervous. How could she teach this boy math—fractions, negative numbers, decimals— if he couldn't see the blackboard, let alone submit his written answers? And what about geometry, a math subject covered in some detail in those days in the eighth-grade math class? To answer that last concern, she already had plans in her lesson to use a collection of actual wooden shapes, squares, rectangles, parallelograms, various triangles, pentagons, spheres, cubes, tetrahedra, rhombuses, and so on.

Anyway it wasn't long before Mrs. Berkner and I had worked out ways for her to teach and me to learn math. In her class, as well as most of the others I was in, I was always able to learn pretty well just by listening.