Intern 6

Another week of teaching has passed!  Wow.  The recurring theme this week was street crossings.  Funny, because that's one reason that I wanted to work with adults for my internship.  My reasoning was that street crossings are one of the hardest things to teach, so I wanted as much practice in that as possible.  And who would be working on these the most?  Probably adults at a rehab center more than children in elementary school.

Which leads to the very in-depth experiences that I had with street crossings in the past week or so.  Many of the intersections here in Daytona are actuated, and it's obvious that they are.  For example, at several intersections, the light on the major street will stay green until a car shows up on the minor street.  Or, the light will not be nearly long enough for a person to cross if they don't press the button/have a button to push.

As I said previously, I feel more and more than I need to teach my students the problem solving skills to be able to assess any crossing that they come to.  I've already told one student that I won't always be there with her, so she needs to be able to confidently make the decision whether or not to cross.

Actuated signals don't seem quite as challenging to teach with my low vision student who can see the pedestrian signal (of course I still want her to pay attention to the traffic).  As for my students who are blind, I think it will be a whole 'nother ball of wax.  My more confident traveler has no problem crossing when it is quiet, but I'm not sure my other two students will be as decisive.  Either way, it is going to take a lot of patience on my part.

The student I have who was struggling with staying in step is still not there, but she is in step more often than she was before.  She also knows how to effectively correct her step as she is walking.  Now the problem is veering.  She tends to turn her head as she crosses a driveway, so she veers in that direction.  This will definitely take more practice.

For one of my lessons with a student who is blind, we recreated a nearby intersection using Tactile Town (with the lane stripes and everything).  It was a last minute thing (it was cold out and had just started raining), but it worked out really well.  The student gained a much better understanding of different parts of the intersection, and she also learned how to identify the corners by their cardinal directions (NW, SW, etc).  She understood where to place the cars (to my surprise) and we talked about when to cross (with the near parallel traffic).  With this experience in mind, I think the Wheatley Picture Maker will be my new best friend on mobility lessons.

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