what a lovely article

An OT student, Bill Wong, posted this on his Facebook profile. What an amazing story.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/23/health/human-factor-burn-victim-rana/index.html

Nearing end of OT school year

Quick poll – if I were to do some give-aways, like for example, making a comment about why you want to be an AOTA member, and then one lucky person gets a free AOTA membership for the  year……would y'all be interested? I typically only get like two or so comments, so I don't want to do a comment giveaway with only a few comments, lol. And I'm not sure AOTA wants to do that with me either with such a small comment base. So….shameful begging here – please, leave a comment telling me what kind of give-aways you would like, and if I can get a bunch of comments, I can go tell AOTA, check it out, yo, let's do a membership give-away. This is, of course, assuming the bigwigs go for it. But I think they would with enough interest. So. Just sayin'.  PS: I moderate comments because the spam is unbearable otherwise, so if it doesn't look like it showed up…it didn't because I have to moderate it. No need to repeat yourself. 🙂

Woo-ie! Only 13 days of school left for me. 4 more days this week, 4 next week because of Memorial Day, then 5 more. My last day is June 8th – a week early – because I'm heading to Scandinavia for a month! Starting with a surprise party for my host father (I was an exchange student for a year – my junior year of high school) in Denmark, then to Northern Norway and Oslo and Aamot, a tiny rural town about an hour and a half southeast of Oslo, where I lived. We don't typically treat kids the last week or so anyway since it's a lot of celebrations, etc. (I guess you still might if you have really low level kids) ANYWAY,

In the last 13 work days, I have FIVE annuals, 3 triennials, and 3 initials. At least. That's barring any panicked parents calling last minute meetings. Annuals mean I have the yearly IEP meeting with the team about a kid. Triennials are the 3-year review evaluations, and initials are well, yeah, initials. The triennials and initials mean I have to evaluate the child and write up reports along with the IEP part. Annuals are just the IEP part. And then I have to annotate all the goals of my kids. And get all the paperwork in. Especially for billing. Etc. Gonna be a busy 13 work days…and I'm sure weekends and nights as well. Gotta get crackalackin'.

Today I hit 3 schools, was there by 7:20. Left around 4. Didn't stop for lunch until around 2:30 when the kids were out. Had to give out sensory processing measure (SPM) questionnaires, observe children, check in with teachers, do treatments, etc. My day got kind of uh, skewed because of multiple plays at multiple schools.

Today after school I was sitting in the learning center and one of my little first graders enters and brightly says “Hi Miss Karen, are you going to steal me today?” It was super cute. I laughed. I am bad about using that phrase, “Can I steal you for a little while?” because I forget that my little hyper linguistic kids are going to pick up on that!

I have to admit I've hit a new low in email life – 485 new emails in google, not to mention about 1,000 to go through again that I've looked at once, and then 2,000 to file in my work box. I'm pretty good about getting the important stuff done, but the little things get forgotten when my boxes are that full, boo. Last summer i had over 1,000 and I got it down to under 100 – so I guess that will be this summer's goal too.

Well, I'm trying to blog daily, even if the daily blog ends up being informal (ie my reflections for the day) rather than one of the many posts I need to finish writing about conference etc.I have 3 weeks to get my life in order before I am gone for about 5-6 weeks (hey robbers: the rest of my family will be home, don't get excited) – let's hope I get motivated. Today was a long busy day so I guess I'm going to not beat myself up for not doing more paperwork/blogwork tonight.

Stroke Rehab, Jan Davis Fan Club

For those of you in stroke rehab, Jan Davis is a MUST-know….google her. I just saw this link on her Facebook page,

http://www.icelearningcenter.com/files/uploads/documents/workbooks/fti-t-sample09.pdf

I started scrolling through it and I wish I had it when I was doing physical dysfunction! Amazing sample. I love Jan Davis. 🙂

Every day I'm O-T-ing… (every dayy I'm shuffffflinnnnggg)

Today I gave a presentation to the 2nd grade teachers, very similar to the one I gave recently to K and 1st at that same school which I discussed recently. [Insert angst here in terms of me not going back to find the link, sorry, I feel guilty, but not guilty enough to go find it.]  We covered the same things, although I went faster over the pieces that didn't pertain as much, and focused on some of the more applicable pieces, SUCH AS – ERASING!!!

When you see kids just writing darker over writing, or doing a poor job erasing, you probably just think the child is being lazy. BUT for the most part, it's more likely the child genuinely has trouble erasing. Watch the child erase and I bet you will see he does it an inefficient angle or in an awkward manner which makes it challenging. (Or maybe even just turning the pencil around is inefficient – kids who use their chest or other hand to turn their pencil around, or drop it on the paper and pick it back up, etc) Eventually, they often give up and just start writing darker over their mistakes. We assume that by older grades, a child just naturally knows how to erase. Not always true. Do eraser exercises – writing letters, rotating pencil within their one dominant hand, and then erasing at an efficient angle/manner. TEACH THEM. SHOW THEM. Do NOT assume. And OTs – I think  that erasing is an area we tend to forget – at least I historically have – but erasing is pretty important too! 🙂

I also talked briefly about quiet fidgets (like a pipe cleaner, a piece of string, etc), DESK ORGANIZATION (another REALLY important area that gets overlooked), and OFFICE SUPPLIES – exposing the kids to rubber bands, staplers, paper clips, folding, etc etc.

My two main points were this.

1) Kids today may be little academic geniuses because of all their educational screen time, and know how to do all these advanced skills quite early, but developmentally,  many of them are the lowest they've EVER been (in comparison to past years of classes) in terms of their physical strength, gross and fine motor coordination, ocular motor skills, eye-hand coordination, etc. This is of course a quite sweeping generalization, but most of the teachers I speak to express concern over the increasing rise of children coming through that are lacking basic foundational skills, as they were skipped in order to achieve academic skills.  So, AWARENESS that they might be in 2nd grade, but still need to be taught things like how to erase properly – and that it's less likely laziness and more likely ignorance.

2) I realize that teachers today are really stretched for time – it's not like 2nd grade teachers have time to just work on fine motor skills. So everything I talked about included easily accessible and cheap materials, most of which could be incorporated into “fun time” activities without the kids even realizing the point behind it. And/or activities that can be done while waiting in line, taking a 15 second break, etc – just tiny little things they can incorporate into their day due to awareness of its importance. Or they may even be doing these things and not realizing what they were working on….so again, AWARENESS.

Tomorrow I'm hiking up a mountain with some friends from work for a birthday party! Guess I should try to get some sleep. Must work on a new product review this weekend + some conference blogging as well. Yes, all those papers are still waiting for me to deal with them.

Oh….someone said something recently in a comment that made me go Ooooh. I have been so bad about posting about OT in a more global sense, instead of just pediatric school OT. I will try to remember to occasionally post more about other areas – and if anyone who reads this wants to do a GUEST posting, just like Ravi did a few days ago on disability rights, it is certainly appreciated.

Picking up small things with that funky 3 finger pencil grip. Genius.  Thanks 2nd grader for figuring that out. 

OT and Disability Rights

I asked Ravi to write a piece for my blog as I thought it would be interesting, considering his historical perspective of OT. We've been corresponding since I first started this blog in 2007. Thank you, Ravi, for taking the time to write this. 🙂

My background with Occupational Therapy is rather idiosyncratic. Although born with spina bifida and requiring crutches and leg braces to ambulate, I had no surgeries after age 11. Raised by a mother who was a paediatrician and a father who was an engineer, we did not spend much time in hospitals or medical clinics in my childhood. And so when I acquired a disability rights consciousness as an undergraduate and in law school, I assumed that occupational therapists were more or less the same as physicians or PTs: i.e. pain inflicting authoritarians who require crips to strip on command and uncritically follow orders. I can distinctly recall going to a movie in the 1990s that was being shown on campus in a space that was later devoted to an OT conference and wanting to tell off all the arriving OTs about the social model, i.e. the proposition that it is structural barriers that are at the root of the problems faced by people with disabilities.

Some years later, when I was doing my doctoral studies, I met some OT students who were members of an accessibility committee on which I served. I became friends with one and was soon in for a huge shock. I expected her to defend the medical model as I understood it: segregation and all the horrors that accompanied it like sterilization. Much to my surprise, I learned that OT is client centred and the more I learned, the more I became convinced that most OTs work in a paradigm that is not that different from the social model. As a lawyer, the practical dimension of problem solving in OT appealed to me. The purely abstract aspect of disability studies has always been problematic: yet another dissertation about the portrayal of the sex lives of women with disabilities in Jane Austen’s novels is not going to necessarily advance the movement for accessibility for people with disabilities today. As I met more and more occupational therapists during my career as an academic and also as a client, it was also remarkable how virtually all OTs had more or less the same caring personality, i.e. extremely happy like Karen Dobyns but maybe without quite the same degree of eccentricities. Many are as passionate about disability rights and equality for people with disabilities as disability studies scholars.

And yet today I think there remains a deep divide between scholars who identify with disability studies and those who identify with rehabilitation. It does not need to be this way. Each discipline can learn from the other. OT is a deliciously innovative discipline (although I am still waiting for a device that will allow crutch users to get through ice and snow) that can truly benefit from engaging in respectful dialogue with disability studies scholars as equal partners. We need occupational therapists to come to disability studies conferences with an open mind. Even ten OTs who chose to attend the Society for Disability Studies conference in the United States (coming to Orlando June 19-22, 2013) and the Canadian Disability Studies Association conference (coming to Waterloo, Ontario at the end of this month) would make a huge difference, both financially and more importantly in terms of intellectual cross-fertilization.  These conferences generally have low registration fees and are open to all. And I would hope OT conferences would make more serious efforts to invite disability studies scholars and advocates to their events.  In the short term, even informal meetings over cookies and cake can generate valuable results. The key is to have a dialogue.

 Ravi Malhotra is Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law, Common Law Section, a graduate of Harvard Law School and a disability rights advocate. He may be reached at ravi.malhotra@uottawa.ca

Miss Karen is NOT an alligator. In case you needed clarification.

I have this one child with autism who once introduced me as “This is Miss Karen, and she is NOT an alligator.” Well, I thought that was a great introduction. Very clarifying. AHAHAHA loved it. Anyway, sometimes when he sees me now he’ll say “Hi Miss Karen, are you an alligator?”   His aide confirmed he asks no one else this question, just me. Not sure where that link came from but I love it. I don’t have an alligator hat, but I think this hat is pretty awesome (it belongs to my mom)….maybe I can switch him over to a shark or monster or whatever this hat is.  Karen Dobyns, occupational therapy shark…..

Typing skills for children in OT

This is one of my lovely (and few) girls. Her mother granted me written permission to use her hands in this video (waves at my boss). This was an occupational therapy session where we focused first on origami (note a piece of it in the corner under the computer) and then on typing. The origami was a visual-motor challenge for both of us…. 😉

 I wrote in washable non-toxic marker on her fingers ASDF and then JKL; so that she didn’t have to lift her fingers to find the right key; we played a free typing game on the Internet focusing on beginning, home row only, ie words like sad. The point of the game was to type out words which made these space things dissapear….we had a little trouble with her isolating her “S” finger but overall she did phenomenally. 🙂 I was so proud of her. I highly recommend writing on their fingers when first working on learning home row. I know they make typing gloves etc too, but so far this low-tech/low-cost way has worked for me, and the kids don’t mind at all (I obviously ask permission, lol). Anyway….hope this video works and doesn’t show up just as a photo. Guess we are about to find out! (I am publishing through Picasa). Note: It came through as a photo so I went back and had to export the video etc. Boo, technology, lol.

Conference Flashback…Me, Erik Johnson aka Army OT Guy + Virtual OT Anita Hamilton…

So I needed to dump my photos onto the computer from my iPhone so I can take pictures today, so then I got into a quick photo spree of Picasa to Blogger….but now it’s time for me to join my mummy. We’re headed to lunch, then dessert at Fruitlandia for pico de gallo (a fruit salad), then travel Scrabble, then TWO different Mother’s Day walks in a row. Yep, that’s love. All her choices. So gotta go. But wanted to say bye for now, many many many many more pictures to come! Plus many posts!!! And product reviews! And etc etc etc etc!!!

Preparing to write about AOTA conference stuff

A picture is worth a thousand words, eh? I seriously have about twenty saved posts in Blogger with titles of stuff I want to write about from conference.