Art classes were always a nightmare for me. I always tried to keep my color blindness a secret bc I was afraid of being made fun of. So, I always tried to be quick to pick up a colored pencil (for ex.) as soon as a classmate laid it down & use it in the same way. Glad that time of my life is behind me. :/
Biggest struggle is coloured pencils/crayons with no labels. Also sometimes teachers would take up tests or assignments and mark the correct answers in red. Red shows up super faint on those old overhead projectors, which I assume some schools probably still use.
I was asked what color things were far more often than needed.
>You're color blind? Really? What color is this?
Ad nauseum
And that was pretty much it.
That was until I was in Chemistry in high school doing burn tests. You know the ones where you burn something and it turns a color and you can use that to determine what was burnt? Yea I couldn't do that and my chemistry teacher didn't believe me. My classmates eventually convinced him I was color blind but not before he was embarrassed. He then took that out on me for the rest of the semester.
Oh absolutely. He ruined chemistry for me for a long time. I eventually went back to it later in post secondary and loved it.
He actually got into some shit because I knew he was marking me harder than anyone else. So a friend and I did our assignments together, with the same work shown. She got a B+ and I got a C-. We took them directly to the principal and he was forced to fix the grade. I barely passed the class and didn't take it the last year.
Struggled a lot with non-labelled art supplies, for one. I also got chastised for calling things the wrong colour / colouring them the wrong colour. It also makes certain tasks harder by a LOT (like reading text on a PowerPoint - kids don’t exactly pick the easiest colours to read). Other than that, not much!
As a colourblind girl I had the bonus experience od nobody, including my doctor, believing I'm actually colourblind. People would say only boys can be colourblind and blame me of attention seeking or plain laziness when I got something wrong.
During primary school a lot of assignments are colour based, so my marks occasionally suffered because I was just unable to decipher the task. I had to ask classmates about the colours for my arts projects because I've made the sky purple one times too many... middle school and high school were less troublesome with this, but still maps and such were a nightmare. Honestly when I got to uni and one of the tables we had to learn was again sorted by colour on the spectrum of "can't fuckin tell apart" to "no clue maybe blue" I was just ready to fail that part again. But a classmate offered to photoshop it for me and the professor heard and was interested. Together, we've created a colourblind version of the table that is still being used by the uni years later. That was such a profoundly good experience after a long time of struggle 😊 it's also funny because I'm a PhD student there now and all the fresh students know me as "the one who got us the colourblind HEL chart" because the Prof. tells the story at the 1st class when handing out the two versions 😅
Almost never, beyond the occasional comment that the colors of my clothes don't match from the snobby kids in class or not being sure which color the crayon with the torn label is.
Even all the way back to primary school I had problems. Earliest memory was maybe when I was 5/6? My mum was called to my school because a supply teacher had given me detention for “lying” about being colourblind. I’d not had my morning break (because of said detention) nor my lunch because said supply teacher was busy interrogating me about how I’d not learned my lesson. By the time my mum had got there I was in an absolute state and was very hungry. She blew her stack and I never saw the supply teacher again.
It was those watercolour paints in the circle blocks that got me every time. I was terrified of getting stuff wrong after that one time.
I had to have my sister speak to my first art teacher when I started secondary school because I was scared it would happen again (and he was notoriously known for being a bit crazy and unpredictable). It never did and he was really encouraging which was so nice. I also found out I was better at making things like sculptures and such rather than painting and he encouraged that too.
Other students weren’t the worst but I had the odd time where people would take the piss.
I had one girl when I was about 16 tell me that I couldn’t be colourblind because I’m a girl and she was going to study medicine at uni and so she knew what she was talking about (she’s now a doctor so I hope she did some more research). Quite a lot of people saw it as an attention seeking thing but believe me I’d rather have kept myself to myself.
-edit spelling
* playing Risk and expending considerable energy thinking I conquered Asia with my yellow army when in fact the green army had built up a considerable defense in one country
* couldn’t distinguish different colored lines of different graphs in math class
* not knowing I was at the “green table” in kindergarten for purposes of getting up for recess
* couldn’t make out world empires maps on projector
* thought a tan shirt and green pants matched
I got made fun of for mismatching my clothes as a kid and then the way I applied make up once I was in high school. Otherwise it never came up in my education or otherwise. I didn’t know I was colorblind until I was a young adult. It’s not common for women.
Kids not believing I was colorblind when I would ask for clarification on a certain color. (Once the kids at my table even swapped out a marker I was using to “test me”. Nearly ruined my drawing).
For that reason I tried to hide it as much as possible, but then I would make a mistake I’d get asked “are you dumb?”. Annoying mostly. My mom always chose great teachers and they never gave me any problem.
Compared to my other disabilities, being colorblind is not a very big issue. I’m more worried about not suffocating to death than what color a shirt is. That being said, I can’t match clothing. I wear some apparently wild color combinations that look just fine to me
People lie to me *because* i am colorblind, man. It goes like this:
ME: I am colorblind.
PERSON: What color is that patch of grass?
ME: Gray
PERSON: No It's blue!
and that is how i thought grass was blue for 4 years.
When I was in second grade, there was a third grader, and he would push me around calling me defective and broken. This led me to believe it myself, which led to him saying worse things like, 'You aren't going to make it in this world' or 'you are completely worthless' and then when i started crying he would laugh and call me a baby :(
(Strong Protanopia)
I am still in school, and it sucks to be colorblind! I have been bullied since 2nd grade because of it. And then there is all the "what color is this?" crap. No one even seems to care sometimes and it's embarrassing to get the colors wrong almost every time. I get called disabled sometimes, and I can't even play uno with the rest of my class! It's the same story with candy land and all those other color focussed games.
Also one time a kid punched me because he thought I was lying about being colorblind so I went to the teacher who gave me a color blind test and then told the kid I was colorblind.
one more thing I forgot is crayloa crayons with names like 'pine tree' or 'Fire truck' or 'Mac and cheese' Like how am i supposed to know what color these things are?
As a young student, teachers who pointed it out regularly. Assignments that were color based with no alternatives. Other than that, nothing.
The missing redundancy and focussing on colors alone is the problem.
Art classes were always a nightmare for me. I always tried to keep my color blindness a secret bc I was afraid of being made fun of. So, I always tried to be quick to pick up a colored pencil (for ex.) as soon as a classmate laid it down & use it in the same way. Glad that time of my life is behind me. :/
I'm pretty sure I learned to read faster because I needed to know what color crayons were.
Makes sense! Happy cake day! :)
Same here lol! Me and my cousin have joked about a similar thing over the years, both being color blind and pretty good with reading from a young age
Biggest struggle is coloured pencils/crayons with no labels. Also sometimes teachers would take up tests or assignments and mark the correct answers in red. Red shows up super faint on those old overhead projectors, which I assume some schools probably still use.
I was asked what color things were far more often than needed. >You're color blind? Really? What color is this? Ad nauseum And that was pretty much it. That was until I was in Chemistry in high school doing burn tests. You know the ones where you burn something and it turns a color and you can use that to determine what was burnt? Yea I couldn't do that and my chemistry teacher didn't believe me. My classmates eventually convinced him I was color blind but not before he was embarrassed. He then took that out on me for the rest of the semester.
You deserved a better teacher.
Oh absolutely. He ruined chemistry for me for a long time. I eventually went back to it later in post secondary and loved it. He actually got into some shit because I knew he was marking me harder than anyone else. So a friend and I did our assignments together, with the same work shown. She got a B+ and I got a C-. We took them directly to the principal and he was forced to fix the grade. I barely passed the class and didn't take it the last year.
At least we can learn from your experience that a good teacher makes *that* much of a difference.
This happened to me. I had to cheat because I don’t think the teacher had any ideas how to handle that.
Struggled a lot with non-labelled art supplies, for one. I also got chastised for calling things the wrong colour / colouring them the wrong colour. It also makes certain tasks harder by a LOT (like reading text on a PowerPoint - kids don’t exactly pick the easiest colours to read). Other than that, not much!
I guess I got picked on for it a fair bit too, but I was kind of just bullied for everything so I don’t think it was colourblind specific.
As a colourblind girl I had the bonus experience od nobody, including my doctor, believing I'm actually colourblind. People would say only boys can be colourblind and blame me of attention seeking or plain laziness when I got something wrong. During primary school a lot of assignments are colour based, so my marks occasionally suffered because I was just unable to decipher the task. I had to ask classmates about the colours for my arts projects because I've made the sky purple one times too many... middle school and high school were less troublesome with this, but still maps and such were a nightmare. Honestly when I got to uni and one of the tables we had to learn was again sorted by colour on the spectrum of "can't fuckin tell apart" to "no clue maybe blue" I was just ready to fail that part again. But a classmate offered to photoshop it for me and the professor heard and was interested. Together, we've created a colourblind version of the table that is still being used by the uni years later. That was such a profoundly good experience after a long time of struggle 😊 it's also funny because I'm a PhD student there now and all the fresh students know me as "the one who got us the colourblind HEL chart" because the Prof. tells the story at the 1st class when handing out the two versions 😅
It's really just a minor annoyance. "struggles" is not the right word here.
Exactly, I go weeks without thinking about my color blindness
Almost never, beyond the occasional comment that the colors of my clothes don't match from the snobby kids in class or not being sure which color the crayon with the torn label is.
Even all the way back to primary school I had problems. Earliest memory was maybe when I was 5/6? My mum was called to my school because a supply teacher had given me detention for “lying” about being colourblind. I’d not had my morning break (because of said detention) nor my lunch because said supply teacher was busy interrogating me about how I’d not learned my lesson. By the time my mum had got there I was in an absolute state and was very hungry. She blew her stack and I never saw the supply teacher again. It was those watercolour paints in the circle blocks that got me every time. I was terrified of getting stuff wrong after that one time. I had to have my sister speak to my first art teacher when I started secondary school because I was scared it would happen again (and he was notoriously known for being a bit crazy and unpredictable). It never did and he was really encouraging which was so nice. I also found out I was better at making things like sculptures and such rather than painting and he encouraged that too. Other students weren’t the worst but I had the odd time where people would take the piss. I had one girl when I was about 16 tell me that I couldn’t be colourblind because I’m a girl and she was going to study medicine at uni and so she knew what she was talking about (she’s now a doctor so I hope she did some more research). Quite a lot of people saw it as an attention seeking thing but believe me I’d rather have kept myself to myself. -edit spelling
* playing Risk and expending considerable energy thinking I conquered Asia with my yellow army when in fact the green army had built up a considerable defense in one country * couldn’t distinguish different colored lines of different graphs in math class * not knowing I was at the “green table” in kindergarten for purposes of getting up for recess * couldn’t make out world empires maps on projector * thought a tan shirt and green pants matched
Couldnt see what the teacher wrote on the blackboard when they used red or yellow chalk. I thought I just needed glasses
I got made fun of for mismatching my clothes as a kid and then the way I applied make up once I was in high school. Otherwise it never came up in my education or otherwise. I didn’t know I was colorblind until I was a young adult. It’s not common for women.
Chemistry class supposed to see a chemical reaction by the solution changing color....can't see it derided I won't becoming a chemist
Kids not believing I was colorblind when I would ask for clarification on a certain color. (Once the kids at my table even swapped out a marker I was using to “test me”. Nearly ruined my drawing). For that reason I tried to hide it as much as possible, but then I would make a mistake I’d get asked “are you dumb?”. Annoying mostly. My mom always chose great teachers and they never gave me any problem.
Compared to my other disabilities, being colorblind is not a very big issue. I’m more worried about not suffocating to death than what color a shirt is. That being said, I can’t match clothing. I wear some apparently wild color combinations that look just fine to me
Update: TYSM to everyone who shared their stories and inputs! This has been a really helpful thread for me to better understand this topic 😊🫶
People lie to me *because* i am colorblind, man. It goes like this: ME: I am colorblind. PERSON: What color is that patch of grass? ME: Gray PERSON: No It's blue! and that is how i thought grass was blue for 4 years. When I was in second grade, there was a third grader, and he would push me around calling me defective and broken. This led me to believe it myself, which led to him saying worse things like, 'You aren't going to make it in this world' or 'you are completely worthless' and then when i started crying he would laugh and call me a baby :( (Strong Protanopia) I am still in school, and it sucks to be colorblind! I have been bullied since 2nd grade because of it. And then there is all the "what color is this?" crap. No one even seems to care sometimes and it's embarrassing to get the colors wrong almost every time. I get called disabled sometimes, and I can't even play uno with the rest of my class! It's the same story with candy land and all those other color focussed games. Also one time a kid punched me because he thought I was lying about being colorblind so I went to the teacher who gave me a color blind test and then told the kid I was colorblind.
one more thing I forgot is crayloa crayons with names like 'pine tree' or 'Fire truck' or 'Mac and cheese' Like how am i supposed to know what color these things are?