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Midvale 7th-grader teaches classmates what it’s like to be visually impaired by Natalie Dicou, The Salt Lake Tribune Cody Phelps has tried telling his classmates what it’s like to have trouble seeing. Last week, he got to show them. Phelps, a seventh-grader who suffers from an eye condition called Retinoschisis, introduced students at Midvale Middle School to a game of "goalball" for the visually impaired. The objective: Roll a ball, filled with bells, past the outstretched hands of an opposing team. The catch: No using your eyes. "Goalball is fun because you get to use your other senses," Phelps said. "I thought if I taught them goalball, they would see what it’s like to be visually impaired or blind." So Phelps’s classmates sported blackout goggles as they challenged each other to a round of goalball. With ears attuned to the sound of bells, they scrambled across the gym floor to block the ball with their bodies. "It was fun because you had to think where the ball is at, and try to hear it," said seventh-grader Eduardo Garnados, who compared goalball to playing goalie blindfolded in a soccer match. "It was cool," fellow seventh-grader Eduardo Zuluga added, "because you experience what it feels like to be blind." "They were doing what they thought was fun," Phelps said. It’s a game they might not have learned otherwise, he said. To play competitively, athletes must have 2200 vision or worse. "You can’t play unless you’ve got really bad vision," Phelps said. "This would be the only place they could learn it, and I wanted to show them how fun it is." |
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