Blindfolded, and Really Seeing

Friday morning, 8:30: Two students walk down a path, blindfolded. Another walks with them, telling them where to step and where not to step. It looks as if she’s herding cats. One boy saunters along, hands in his pockets, zig-zagging all over the place; the other grips a railing with two hands and hunches his shoulders, as if making himself smaller will make the task easier.

 

This is American Literature class.

 

The blindfold exercise is one that English teacher Peter Jenkins uses every year. “It is designed to help students focus on their senses (especially non-seeing ones) as a way of sharpening their writing,” he says. “It is also a trust-building exercise; you have to rely on your classmate to get you to the dining hall and get you breakfast and then get you back to class.” Mutual trust makes it easier for students to edit one another's work. “They can be more critical without appearing judgmental,” Jenkins says.

 

Out on the sidewalk, whether they wear blindfolds or guide other students, the students, all juniors, are predictably unsettled.

 

“We depend on our eyes way too much,” one of them concludes.

“Even though I thought I would know where I was, I couldn’t tell,” says another.

“It’s scary to realize that people are depending on you.”

“I was mad at myself because I really wanted to help, but when [they] were walking all over the place, it was funny and I couldn’t help laughing.”

 

The exercise follows up on the class’s recent reading assignment: “Cathedral,” the short story by Raymond Carver, in which a sighted couple invites a blind man to their home. The husband, who is the story’s narrator, is unkind, insensitive, and caught up in superficial stereotypes. As he spends the evening with the blind man, though, his cynicism fades and the stereotypes begin to fall away.

 

Both the story and the blindfold exercise are about self-awareness—how we see ourselves, how others see us, and how important it is to go beneath the surface of everyday life. “If you spend all your time thinking about how others see you, or what you’re going to wear, or whom you’ll sit with at lunch, then you’re not really thinking,” Jenkins says. The same idea applies to the students’ writing assignments. “If you write thinking about how I’m going to grade your paper, then you automatically distance yourself from your topic,” he says.

 

Wearing blindfolds forces the students, albeit briefly, to adapt, like the blind man in “Cathedral,” to new circumstances and the environment around them. Even finding a chair in the dining hall and sitting down—never mind deciding who else is at the table—becomes a challenging experience.

 

“It’s amazing how quickly things can happen,” one student says.

“I was doing pretty well outside until I walked into a snow bank,” says another.

“I was trying to predict what was around me and I was always wrong.”

 

“It’s called experiential learning,” Jenkins says. “By doing, you learn, in theory. It’s something we do a lot of in life. We might try to fix a lawnmower, or make a really good omelet. It’s usually failure that teaches us how to be successful.”