iPaid for the iPad.

Finally broke down and got an iPad for Blue.  We have the program "Tap-Speak Choice" on it.  Seems mighty useful already just to have the iPad.  SO easy to show Blue things and places while he sits at his table.  And we don't even have the tap-speak programmed yet. Just started.  It's easy to program it,  even for a dolt like me!  Making pages, using symbols and photos, and layering the pages to ANY set of choices you want.  The biggest requirement is time.

I'll update as we work with it.  Cheers!

Ach! When can I give up ?!

Oh my hairy, stinky, ever-loving, excoriated, downward-pointing Stars!  When can I give up?

Blue's in daycare: I tell the lady, "He can sit on his own, if you just stay close to him and support a bit at the shoulders like this . . ."   She looks straight at/through me, smiles, and waits for me to leave.

Blue's in grade 1: I tell the lady, "He should have a bar on his desk, and he can sit there, out of his wheelchair and hold on, if you just stay close and make sure he knows he won't topple more than an inch away from centre." She smiles, and nothing happens . . .

Blue's in grade 2: I make a video of him sitting at the table and holding on by himself for 30 minutes.  I send a copy to the physiotherapist and other folks.  Nothing happens.

Blue's in grade 4: He changes schools, and I tell the principal, the lady, the teacher, the SEA, the world, the northern hemisphere, the dust bunnies, and other people that the diapers aren't necessary.  They look at me like I eat diapers for lunch and isn't that bearnaise sauce just the trick?

Blue's in grades 5 - 8: I blather, foam, mutter, mumble, dance, stand on my head and do the jitterbug. I tell the lady, "The diapers are actually for you.  HE doesn't need them.  The lift, the sling, the commode is actually for you.  He has a modern-age, portable, fully-adjustable lift that has its own power source to get in and out of his wheelchair; to the toidy, etc."  They wake up for a nanosecond and look at me and ask, "Really?  A portable, fully-adjustable lift with its own power supply?  What is it?"  I brutalize them with the truth.  I say, "His legs!"  It's too much to process.  Their eyes glaze over, I disappear into the fog.  Forty-five 3-inch binders with D-shaped rings bursting with professional gobbledy-gook are the last things I see as I pass out.

Blue goes to high school:  I stupidly take a luxurious sigh of relief.  The Canucks lose the Stanley Cup final.  Who cares?  I rehash my mantra.  He doesn't need the diapers.  He wants to use his hands.  He needs to get out of the wheelchair.  There are ways to help him stop the ever-open mouth and persistent gagging.  The diapers are for you.  He doesn't actually like to pee in his pants.  The sky is blue.   Kangaroos are native to Australia.  Carbon has four bonding sites. Tomatoes are actually fruit!  The SEA says the teachers don't allow it.  The teacher says the OT didn't approve it.  The OT says, "Oh James, you're up on your soapbox again."  The big meeting happens, 14 chefs and a simple sandwich cannot be made.  Holy bureaucrap, Batman!

Nothing is ever going to happen in this forest of plastic trees!  I don't need ONE creative professional.  I need an entire new school!  We cannot start one; because it does not exist here.

Here I stop.  I can no longer add the word, "yet."  Yet is a four-letter word today.  

The Emperor's New Hands

Apologies : I got all confabulated with email addresses and passwords and it took me a while to get back into my blog. It's nice to be back in here. As for the big CE school project: all was ready but the ten students. There are students, no doubt, but they are spread too far to reasonably commute to one spot. Maybe that will have to come later. 
      For now, CE marches on; or hug-walks in its own fashion.
      For me, I am happy about the arm splints! So, we finally have some arm splints. It took the kind persistence of Zsuzsi to remind me (now 3 years later) that she wants Blue to use arm splints here and there throughout his day. Bless her determination. On a recent trip to Hungary, she and her husband Artur went to no small lengths to get the splints and a grab bar with suction cups from the Peto Institute. I sent her the measurements for Blue's arms, and somewhere overseas a nice person sat down at their sewing machine and made them for us! Some soft cotton cloth, a few plastic stiffeners, some velcro, and voila! Look at that kid hold on, and he's relaxed, and watching the video, looking at the book, and all this without the heavy wheelchair and stuff. What a breath of fresh air.
      When I begged the PT and OT over here in Canada to please please please get me some arm splints; they refused. So, often I hear that; and my son's arms are starting to look more and more like chicken wings. His hands are looking like they could easily end up permanently bent like accessories instead of useful limbs.
      My stars, why are these things allowed to go on for so many years? It's as obvious as global warming. Anyone with a human body can see what is happening to his legs, arms, and hands; and what am I told to do about it? Get an assessment, put buttons by his head, accept that this happens, and la de bloody da!

 So, as not to spite them nor angrily smite them;
 I did what we could for my little man,
who needs not a "lift" to go the can.
 He has legs, and can stand!
 He prefers it, I proffer;
Nuts to the offer
of gear and gadgets that disarm my son.
He holds, we count past a hundred and one;
He grips at the bar and leans on his arms,
These simple things simply contain all the charms;
drained by "pros" like spaghetti from sauce,
(Things would be different if I were the boss.)
So we sigh and sniffle and stare at the sky,
why can't we just start with HIM? Tell me why;
well, actually don't. I've heard it before,
take out the ef, you're left with a bore.
The ef is from effort, you've seen that before?
Or is this all Greek, you see not what I seek? 
I see him do this each day of the week!
He will, and he likes it; he does, and he do.
One only need try, yet they never knew.


Rhyme, rhyme; waste my time.  Somehow feels a bit better though.

B.C Teachers: you want to help? Get out of the way!

Holy smokes, the B.C. teachers are now on strike and a great deal of the whining going on is about the number of special needs students popping up in the classroom. It seems the integration movement has its drawbacks.

Is an everyday classroom overburdened with its "special needs" students? If so, maybe the answer lies in building an everyday, normal classroom setting for the special needs students; like, say, a Conductive Education School!

Speaking as a parent, I don't believe my boy's classroom ever went at his pace. The work was never the same for him, and the goals in his "IEP" were always vague and ridiculously easy; somewhat like a horoscope reading for the day.

Speaking as a teacher, (13 years now in an independent school) there is a megatonne of value in a school developed to serve one category of special needs students. For 30 years now, the Purpose Independent Secondary School has been successfully operating a program with over 40% "special need" students. It's a happy place, nobody feels left out; and parents are always remarking that great things happen here that just weren't possible in the 'normal' system. We get most of our students because they have given up and dropped out of the normal schools. The curriculum is the same; the atmosphere is different.

Now Purpose wants to open the Purpose School of Conductive Learning; the PuSCLe as I like to call it. Everything is in place but the 10 primary / elementary students necessary to start a new independent school.

Maybe it's time to stop thinking there is something scandalous about 'segregating' students. As the Purpose Secondary School shows, they can get into the same rhythm and progress together. After all, they don't demand that the football team have a volleyball player or two at each practice. And wouldn't the volleyball players all have more fun playing the same game? AND, aren't all these players engaging in sports anyway? SO, maybe the integration issue isn't such a big, fat, hairy deal to us: the families of these special nerds. After all, segregation has the same root as congregation; and a conductive classroom is a very gregarious place, bubbling with laughter and cheers at a rate unheard of in the normal school room.

Maybe we'd like to be free from the irrepressible good-will and endless talk of a system that perhaps may need our kids more than the reverse. After all, $36,000 per kid is some tasty temptation to a school board. When a boy who has been literally standing up and bearing his weight since toddlerhood is given no choice but a sling and a lift at toilet time, just because he's in school and they refuse to facilitate the use of his own body; well, it seems to me the tail may be wagging the dog. Or at the very least, someone is doing something to the dog. Poor beast.

In his book, Creating Tomorrow's Schools Today, Richard Gerver suggests that schools were structured for teachers first and children second. I must say that I've seen more proof of this than I have of its inversion. I must say that I'm tired of hearing about the teachers' woes. And I must say that I'm not asking for anything more from the school system. I think it's time to just embrace the "volleyball players" as a team, and let them have their own practice, their own space, and their own coach; and their own fun.

8 reasons why Minnesota is better than British Columbia

1. Minnesota has a horizon, not just a bunch of silly mountains.
2. In Minnesota, they don't commit crimes en masse when the stupid hockey team loses.
3. In Minnesota, hockey is fun and religion is confined to church.
4. In Minnesota, people say "hi" when you look at them.
5. High-school kids in Minnesota don't think marijuana is salad.
6. Minnesota fans are happy to make the acquaintance of Canuck fans at Wild games. Canuck fans are sad that they might get in trouble if they pee on your pants as you stand at the urinal.
7. In Minnesota, there's not a starbucks every four blocks.
8. In Minnesota, six cans of beer aren't priced like six cans of caviar.

Stupid fish.

I've never seen the English version of "Finding Nemo"; but in the Spanish version, at the climax of the story when everyone is stuck in the net and it seems all is lost, the absent-minded Dory says, "Nada haremos."
This means, "Nothing we will do." BUT, the verb "nadar"(to swim) when conjugated as "nadaremos" means, in the future tense, "We will swim." These two phrases sound so similar that a group misinterpretation occurs. Dory was giving up, but everyone else thought she was chanting, "Let's swim together." It created a storm of co-operation; changing everything for everybody involved.
Somehow this screwball approach to success sounds familiar to me. Perhaps I have to tell myself this, for I have been surrounded not only by spendid folks like the conductive types I've met since 2000; but also by a veritable HORDE of nay-sayers. I feel (occasionally) that I must be nuts; that something indeed very large and compelling is wrong with me for drifting along so loyally with conductive education.
Ought I to be doubting it, at last? Hasn't the time come for me to drop this tattered flag and tramp on back through the mud to my camp?
Sigh.
Well, let me think about it...heck no! The end result of Dory's ravings and the blind repetitions of the hopeless crowd was FREEDOM. Freedom is not a thing easily found these days, even though so many institutions are set up to look out for the Canadian family.
As an American by birth, freedom has been kind of cemented in my head. Cement though, does not birth freedom. That is best done with more pliable things: like whoopee cushions, songs for reaching up, and group cheers at every object tossed about the room.
It's too easy to see the net; but why look at that bureaucrap when the massive, swirling, pulsing ocean sprawls out around us at every side?

God love 'im; Dad's gone on to Greater Glory.

Truly, there does come a point when a guy has had too much. With my amazing Dad, his battle with lymphoma had just plain tuckered him out. He did a splendid job of it; and my Mom too as they tried to counter, cure, reverse, ameliorate - whatever - the effects of his illness. In late August, we went for his first golf game in a long time. We celebrated his birthday with family, and then it flared up again. Just today, Remembrance Day, at 9:pm Minnesota time, we held his hands and rubbed his hair for the last time as his next big adventure began. He had had enough, and boy oh boy, am I gonna miss him.