My first week is over! And I am so tired! It was a long week, on Tuesday afternoon I could have sworn it was Thursday. Amanda, my supervising teacher, had been working with the transition program over the summer, so this week was the first week back for her so and we had a lot of paper work to do and phone calls to make. She said that the following weeks as we see clients more regularly we’ll be going out more, and doing more hands on O&M and less office work.
The paperwork is somewhat mind numbing and tedious. As I understand it DBS funds the Lighthouse, so every thing we do, every phone call, every email, every client visit has to be recorded and applied to a certain client so we can bill DBS for our services. It is a lot of tracking our time, and then coding our time, and writing up what we did with who. It’s a long process and I think the adjustment from FSDB is a little over whelming. At FSDB all the kids came to me, the same time every day, and I wrote lesson plans, recorded anything exceptional that occurred, but that was about it. Here it’s way more complex, and I understand why, but I am missing that interaction I had at FSDB. I was used to spending 95% of my day with my students, and I saw them everyday. Here I spend a little more than half of a day with clients, and Fridays are kept open so we can focus solely on data entry and paper work all day. Sometimes we may only see a client once a month. It’s hard to build rapport and build skills when you only see someone 12 times a year. I wish there was a way they could make the paperwork more efficient so more time could be spent with clients.
However, I do like that at the end of every lesson we write case notes that are broken up into sections based on the client’s goals, such as street crossing, campus travel, orientation, cane technique etc. We state where we met the client and what we worked on. When putting this information in the database we have to rate their skills before and after each lesson on a scale from 1-5. This makes tracking progress very easy. So for this reason I do see the benefit of some aspects of the paperwork.
As for mobility, I am enjoying observing Amanda and how she gives prompts when needed, but also gives each student the opportunity to attempt things independently. So far we have worked with a few college students on campus orientation and travel. Campuses are very difficult; the buildings are all arranged differently, with no apparent order to the other buildings around them. In our first O&M course we worked inside the building, but now that I’m working outside them it is much trickier.
We have also been working with some adults. This is new for me too, and I’m learning the teaching style is very different from high school students. Adults can be asked to correct their two point touch, or walk faster, but ultimately there is only so much the O&M teacher can do. Not that you can force a child to do something, but there is a different kind of rapport and respect.
So, things are going good so far and I’m excited to keep observing and start teaching some myself!
