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Apr. 4th, 2014 02:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckI have survived the Disabilities Awareness Workshop. I hurt all over from the standing and walking that I did. I think I'm going to excuse myself from my regular daily exercise programs.
I got there about 8:50 to discover that they'd changed my station assignment again. I spent the first two hours taking groups of kids around the school to see whether or not the building met the legal requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. For the most part, the building followed the letter of the law, but there were things that weren't quite right. The classroom bathrooms are too small for a wheelchair (couldn't even get through the door). The push button automatic doors don't stay open nearly long enough. Not all the drinking fountains are accessible. There's a ramp down to the third, fourth and fifth grade classrooms. It's possible to go up and down it in a wheelchair, but it's fairly difficult. We thought it might be steeper than it's supposed to be.
There were three groups touring the school at any given time. Two of them (mine included) had a wheelchair for the kids to take turns using. The third group was led by a man who used a wheelchair and who could show the kids what worked and what didn't.
The first group I took around was pretty good about staying on task. I think the teacher's assistant who accompanied us made a big difference. The second group had a lot of trouble paying attention. By the end of the tour, most of them had only marked four or five things (out of sixteen) on their sheets. There was one thing we couldn't get an answer on because the woman working in the office today didn't know if their phones are TDD equipped, and there were a couple of things we didn't really do thoroughly, namely checking the height of doorknobs and how easily someone in a wheelchair could turn them and push or pull the door open and how wide the doors were. For that last, I tended to figure that, if our sample wheelchair could get through, the door was wide enough.
I spent the last hour sitting down. As last year, I did the dyslexia station. I had six minutes to run two or three kids through a set of four exercises. I had two kids out of about eighteen who admitted to having dyslexia. I don't feel like I did a really great job explaining the exercises. I did have one girl who looked at all of them and said that she couldn't possibly cope if she had that sort of learning disability. I told her that, if she did, she'd have to learn to go on. Life doesn't stop going forward just because someone has a disability. A couple of kids wanted to know why there isn't a medicine to make dyslexia better. I said that we just don't know enough about the brain and how it works yet.
After the workshop was over, they had pizza and soda pop and salad for everybody. I had a little pop (I desperately wanted the sugar and caffeine), but I can't have pizza with tomato sauce, and the salad didn't look particularly appealing.
On my way out of the building, I stopped at the library to talk to the woman running the book fair. Last night, I sold a copy of a book that needed to be held because it was the last available copy. I wrote down the wrong part of the title because I failed to realize that there were several Dolly Dress Up (or something like that) sticker books, and we had to figure out which one I actually sold so that we could deliver it to the girl who'd bought it. Fortunately, I recognized it when I saw it.
The woman running the book fair told me that we sold about $700 worth of books last night. That's nowhere near what we hoped for, but it's better than I thought it was. I don't think the book fair will break $2000, not unless a lot of people come in today which seems unlikely.
I got there about 8:50 to discover that they'd changed my station assignment again. I spent the first two hours taking groups of kids around the school to see whether or not the building met the legal requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act. For the most part, the building followed the letter of the law, but there were things that weren't quite right. The classroom bathrooms are too small for a wheelchair (couldn't even get through the door). The push button automatic doors don't stay open nearly long enough. Not all the drinking fountains are accessible. There's a ramp down to the third, fourth and fifth grade classrooms. It's possible to go up and down it in a wheelchair, but it's fairly difficult. We thought it might be steeper than it's supposed to be.
There were three groups touring the school at any given time. Two of them (mine included) had a wheelchair for the kids to take turns using. The third group was led by a man who used a wheelchair and who could show the kids what worked and what didn't.
The first group I took around was pretty good about staying on task. I think the teacher's assistant who accompanied us made a big difference. The second group had a lot of trouble paying attention. By the end of the tour, most of them had only marked four or five things (out of sixteen) on their sheets. There was one thing we couldn't get an answer on because the woman working in the office today didn't know if their phones are TDD equipped, and there were a couple of things we didn't really do thoroughly, namely checking the height of doorknobs and how easily someone in a wheelchair could turn them and push or pull the door open and how wide the doors were. For that last, I tended to figure that, if our sample wheelchair could get through, the door was wide enough.
I spent the last hour sitting down. As last year, I did the dyslexia station. I had six minutes to run two or three kids through a set of four exercises. I had two kids out of about eighteen who admitted to having dyslexia. I don't feel like I did a really great job explaining the exercises. I did have one girl who looked at all of them and said that she couldn't possibly cope if she had that sort of learning disability. I told her that, if she did, she'd have to learn to go on. Life doesn't stop going forward just because someone has a disability. A couple of kids wanted to know why there isn't a medicine to make dyslexia better. I said that we just don't know enough about the brain and how it works yet.
After the workshop was over, they had pizza and soda pop and salad for everybody. I had a little pop (I desperately wanted the sugar and caffeine), but I can't have pizza with tomato sauce, and the salad didn't look particularly appealing.
On my way out of the building, I stopped at the library to talk to the woman running the book fair. Last night, I sold a copy of a book that needed to be held because it was the last available copy. I wrote down the wrong part of the title because I failed to realize that there were several Dolly Dress Up (or something like that) sticker books, and we had to figure out which one I actually sold so that we could deliver it to the girl who'd bought it. Fortunately, I recognized it when I saw it.
The woman running the book fair told me that we sold about $700 worth of books last night. That's nowhere near what we hoped for, but it's better than I thought it was. I don't think the book fair will break $2000, not unless a lot of people come in today which seems unlikely.
