making mistakes

     I could see a real difference in Billy’s demeanor after he was so successful today.  I think it’s something important to build into lessons – opportunities to be successful.  Now, I’m not for setting up situations in which students are never wrong.  It’s definitely important to mess up and learn from it, especially in O&M where errors can have real consequences; they can even be dangerous.  I’m not so sure about this “errorless learning” we’ve been working with in other classes where you dive in and give the right answer so the student doesn't hear/see the wrong answer.  Mistakes are important, especially when they are corrected and explained by a teacher.  I had a professor at Mercer who always taught us to finish a lesson on a success.  It seems pretty obvious, but I’ve found it to be helpful.  If you can ensure finishing up with success, then the struggle to grasp in the middle doesn’t have quite the sting that it might otherwise.

A pretty great day.

     Today, I worked so hard to be more Zen-like and take direction from distracters, not get stuck in the minutia that comes from those distracters. It felt so great to be successful!  I was able to easily correct the few things that didn’t go smoothly, so today felt good.  Other than my big giraffe steps, I think things went really well. I think I really do have a tendency to trail with my left hand when I feel a bit unsure.  I think that hand might have to go in my pocket for a while, especially around the bathroom.

     The first floor got a bit more mysterious today, but I was proud I was able to navigate it successfully.  I really had to work hard on imagining the end of the hall in order to be successful because I couldn’t get the information I needed from following walls.  Because of all those things lining the hall, I wasn’t able to fall back on shore-lining the wall, like I had the past few times.  I couldn’t use my tactual backup.  So really, it was a good thing all that stuff was there because it forced me to use more complex skills.

     Those stairs though, got me, as they tend to do.  It’s still really frustrating.  I know the trouble starts when I start thinking too much and stop moving.  Still, knowing that going down stairs works better if I just go, I can’t always convince myself to make my legs work.  I was able to be pretty successful that first time through (with just a tiny bit of redo), but I felt very reckless and unsafe – kind of like I was running down the stairs.  That second time around, though, I was really off balance, and the stairs didn’t seem to be at right angles, like the first time through.  I was so sure that I was just gonna miss a few stairs entirely.  I even reverted to sliding my foot to find the steps.  I was trying to be subtle (probably not successfully). :-) Now, I realize that reaching with my foot probably just made me more off balance, but in the moment, I was really not into trusting my cane.

     On the teaching side… Lauren learned so quickly!  I wasn’t sure if I was throwing things at her too fast, but each time I checked her knowledge, she was dead on.  She really does have a great sense of direction and concept of the space.  

     I think teaching worked so much better this time around because I spent more time having Lauren show me what she knew.  I think this worked well because she already has a lot of knowledge about the building, and she easily puts together new information.  Many times, she surprised me.  I was intending on teaching part of the route, but today, I first asked to see if she could complete the skill before I taught it.  Every time except the last, she was able to put it together without instruction.  I know that won’t be the case with most students, but it is a good lesson for me in not setting the expectations too low.  If I hadn’t asked Lauren to show me all her skills, I would have spent a bit of time teaching her things she’d already figured out.

           

     So, her final task was an extension of the “let’s see what Lauren can figure out day.”  I wasn’t sure she could do it, but I knew that she’d been introduced to each piece of information she’d need to complete the task.  I had a really hard time letting Lauren be wrong.  So many times, I would have stepped in and given some sort of prompt.  It was a good exercise, I suppose, learning to sit on my hands and bite my tongue.  

Tuesday

     Tuesday, we got to see Billy navigate in his building.  He seemed a bit turned around, and I wonder if it was because of all the people sitting in the chair area.  I wonder if their presence had an impact on Billy’s focus?   I know I would have been more self conscious, but then again, not much seems to faze Billy; he’s so chill under blindfold.

     It was pretty interesting to see Amber when she got disoriented after coming down the stairs into the entrance.  She didn’t know what set of stairs she was on.  It’s funny how quickly our stress and confusion color our impressions and makes it hard to remember what’s going on.  I think it might have been that she was so turned around the first time she learned the route.  It’s hard to make good, solid memories of routes when your brain is otherwise occupied with other things like stress and everything else in the environment.

     I’ve been thinking about the whole being right while teaching thing, and I think I am really going to try focusing less on being right and more on finding a way that works and seeing how that goes.  I think if I act more confident in my teaching choices, I’ll seem more confident and things will go more smoothly.  We’ll see how that goes this time around.

Thursday

            I was more nervous than I anticipated teaching Lauren on Friday.  When trying to plan out how to teach her, I was overwhelmed.  There were so many options, and I had a hard time sorting out all the options.  I know that I needed to be decisive, but that just wasn’t happening.  So, maybe the lesson from Thursday is that I should go with the gut instinct and see what happens.  I know that, like with learning any complicated skill, you’ve just got to give it a try and then reevaluate what you’re going and try again.  I think perhaps I’m struggling a bit with the fact that there isn’t really an absolute right way to teach a route.  I’m just a tad overwhelmed with getting it right.

            I was very uncomfortable keeping Lauren safe on the stairs, especially at first.  I’m sure she could tell; I’m sure everyone could tell.  It kind of a big deal, someone depending on me to keep them safe, and I didn’t want to take it lightly.  I know that my own worry about keeping myself stable on the stairs makes it hard to feel comfortable keeping someone else safe doing the same.   I’m gonna have to work on it. 

           

            It was really nice that Lauren was so successful in learning her route.  I think it was good for us both.  Though, I will say that I felt it was more due to Lauren’s skill than my teaching.  Still, she didn’t die, and I did teach her something, so perhaps I was more successful than I thought. 

            I really liked the quick lesson in my building.  It was nice to be successful and learn a few new things.  After having a pretty frustrating end to my last lesson, it was nice to go back and be successful in a short period of time.  I was cool to expand my understanding of the building, even if it was just learning what the other side of the hallway was like.    

Rugs, Stairs, and Maps

            Today, I really felt like I was able to synthesize more of what I saw.  Maybe I am learning?!  The first thing was that there are lots of things in the environment that you just don’t pay attention to visually.  For example, when Amber got confused about where the stairs were located, it was the multiple rug locations that threw her off.  Until Mickey pointed out that the rug conundrum was her problem, I hadn’t even noticed that there were rugs on the floor.  Obviously, the three or four rugs in the hall are very confusing if you are experiencing the hall tactually.  Visually, I overlooked them because they weren’t important to me moving visually down the hall.  Also, as we went up the stairs in the middle of the building, there was that stretch where the second half of the flight didn’t line up with the first half.  I didn’t even notice the difference until I noticed it throwing Amber off.

            Amber got turned around today, and from my own turned-around experience I can really buy into the idea that you react to the environment in your head instead of reacting to what you are experiencing when blindfolded.  Vision is pretty encompassing; so with little effort, you can see ahead and behind of where you are currently.  When blindfolded, you really only know what you are touching and hearing at that moment.  Even though you can sense sounds from a distance, they are often transient, unlike visual images, which generally last a while.  So, it makes sense that you would be most effective if you base your next move off your current position.  I’m not so sure about this, but perhaps having a detailed floor plan is not so important as knowing where you want to go and then taking steps to get there based on your current location.  I know I have a very visually oriented plan of what my building looks like in my head.  It works great as long as I stay on the path and things that I expect appear as I anticipate them.  But, if I get turned around, my plan doesn’t really help out all that much.  And, of course, there’s the problem with teaching congenitally blind people to visualize the space in that manner.  So, maybe the key really is more like stop thinking so much about what to do and start going to see what you’ll find.

            I get to teach Lauren on Thursday.  I’m a little nervous, but mostly, I’m excited to try it again, implementing what I’ve learned so far.  

Attempt Number Two

     Thursday was most definitely an interesting day.  At the end of it, my brain was so completely full.  I felt very confident finding the elevator and then navigating the second floor.  It was feeling pretty great until those stairs.  There’s some still some serious anxiety about the stairs.  In fact I was just about to cry when I went back up to do the stairs for the second time.  I think it was important to do them again, but, man, I was pretty emotionally on edge.  I will say though, that I was proud of doing them successfully on my second time through.

      So, with the stairs done, I had to get out of the stairwell.  Goodness, I so could not remember that I needed to go up those steps to find the hallway. To come off the feelings of coming down the stairs and not remember how to get out of the stairwell was incredibly frustrating.  I felt very unsuccessful.  I totally couldn’t keep anything straight in my mind.  It really did feel like there were all these stairs to nowhere.  I feelt better about getting out of the stairwell once I got to practice it the first time and do it successfully the second.  Once I got going in the hallway, I was feeling good, but then, I hit that 45 degree angle in the hall, and that’s when I got lost.  It helped when Lauren drew a map drawn for me, but still, I was so confused about how to get from where I was to where I wanted to be. 

       The second round was better up to the point of the open stairwell.  At that point, I was so tired.  I figured it out though, and moved on, but I’m not sure where things went wrong.  I really just wanted to be finished and not think any more because I was so lost.  I had no clue what walls went what way, and the hall quieted down, so I couldn’t really depend on information from other people.  I think in my desire to be finished, I started to make some really silly mistakes – like moving without a plan or destination in mind.

       That first floor is still such a mystery to me.  Still.  I think it might be helpful to come down the first floor hallway from the opposite direction to flesh out my concept of the area.  I think the core of my frustration came from not being able to figure out the problem I was presented with.  I think it’s interesting that I could point to the front door for much of the time, but I had trouble finding what I was looking for.  It’s pretty frustrating, knowing exactly where I want to go and not being able to get there.

       A few times, I heard Mickey prompt me to solicit assistance, and a few things kept me from doing so, because goodness knows, I was in need of assistance.  The first was my pride.  I didn’t want to need help, so I would have rather gotten more lost in an effort to figure it out myself than to have asked for help.  The second, more overriding factor, was that I didn’t have enough information to ask for help. I was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t think how to ask an intelligent question.  I didn’t know what information I needed from another person.

      I do think too much, that’s for sure.  In the end, when you all stopped responding to my questions, I liked that because I wasn’t tempted to ask questions, I knew I wouldn’t get an answer, so I began to rely exclusively on my ideas. I can tell I will really struggle with answering questions for myself.  Hopefully I can have this tendency brought to my attention enough that I will be able to resist the desire to ask for too much or give too much to my students.

Nursing Building: Take 2

            Today, we headed back to the nursing building and Billy got his second shot at working in his building.  This time around, I was thrown off by the construction downstairs.  I imagine that would be really distracting (not to mention potentially dangerous) for a blind person.  The continually shifting environment would only add anxiety to an already confusing space.

            I noticed that Billy was having trouble in the first floor lobby, so I was trying to think differently about the space.  Perhaps the things that make rooms visually appealing (curved walls, open spaces) might make them a lot harder to navigate with a cane.  I also think those chairs in the entryway are really distracting.  I remember coming across chairs while blindfolded in the office suite in Stone, and each time I hit a chair, I has something new to square off against that threw me off.  I think Billy might be in the same boat.  When you come across a chair with a cane, you can’t tell which side you’re hitting, so you can’t really tell if you’ve found the front or side, since your cane only hits the base.   But, when you see one side of a chair, you can figure out how it stands in relation to the wall automatically.  I wonder how you figure that out without touching more of the chair and looking like a for real blind person.

            I’m pretty excited to go back to my building.  I’m curious to see what I remember, and I’d love to expand my understanding of the building.  Working under blindfold is such a unique and enlightening experience.  I wish we could do it more often!