As I look back at the 50-plus years I have spent in my profession, and as I look at its current and potential future leaders, I am filled with pride as I remember past accomplishments and as I consider its strong and dynamic future. Recently, I began a list of the four great accomplishments of educators in the field of visual impairment and blindness over the last half of the 20th century. The list soon expanded to seven, and it is these accomplishments that I would like to discuss in this essay. SEVEN GREAT ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF EDUCATORS IN THE FIELD Professionalization of teaching students with visual impairments The first great accomplishment is that teaching students with visual impairments has become a profession. In the not-too-distant past, teaching and working with visually impaired students and adults was considered a folk art. There was very little writing on the education of visually impaired students. Only two methods books were available to me when I first started teaching: Education and Health of the Partially Seeing Child, by Winifred Hathaway (1994), and The Blind Child and His Reading, by Kathryn Maxfield (1928). Today, thanks largely to the commitment of the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), we have many excellent, state-of-the-art books. There was almost no research being conducted in the field 50 years ago. Today, we have many outstanding researchers. We no longer pass along information and techniques verbally from one generation of teachers to the next, as happened when I first started to teach. Today, we are a profession, and we can stand tall and proud of the status we have worked so hard to achieve. Professionalization of O&M The second major accomplishment is that O&M instruction has also became a profession. In the 1950s, individuals in the field heard about those working with blinded veterans at the Hines Veterans Hospital in Chicago, Illinois. But it was not until Boston College established the first formal, university-based O&M personnel preparation program in 1960 that O&M began to achieve professional status. In less than 50 years, O&M has significantly changed the educational lives of visually impaired children, largely because the professionals of this field were eager to look at the O&M needs of all children and adults with vision loss. Education of children with multiple disabilities The third significant accomplishment is that the education of visually impaired children with additional disabilities became our responsibility. Long before PL 94-142 (the Education for All Handicapped Children Act) was passed in 1975, many teachers of visually impaired students were working with children with complex additional disabilities. We did not do this because it was required by law--we did it because it was the right thing to do. Recognition of low vision Thanks to the research of Natalie Barraga, our fourth major accomplishment occurred when we recognized that many legally blind children, in reality, had low vision. After Dr. Barraga taught us that these children had usable vision, over the course of a few years, in the early 1960s, many children with low vision who were learning to read braille were switched to reading print. For a while, the utilization of vision among low vision students may have been embraced to an extreme as we desperately tried to help these children learn to read. But, as a profession, we continued to study and research how best to serve low vision children, and the current status of the education of these children is excellent and continually improving. Expansion of personnel preparation Personnel preparation of teachers of visually impaired children has grown, invented, and re-invented itself since the middle of the 20th century, and this growth is our fifth major accomplishment. When I decided to become a teacher of the visually impaired, I had six choices of universities, and two of them had part-time programs in my area of study. …