I had taken a picture of a stack of notebooks the other day and was going to write a post about them but other things came up and the topic got moved down the priority list. I'm glad it did, because today, not two days later, I've taken a new picture based on how things have changed.
The students in my daughter's class are doing distanced learning using Google Classroom in conjunction with some other sites and tools. The organization and thought that's been put into the platform and by the teachers is impressive. There is connectivity and continuity in many things where confusion abounded last school year when we were thrust into distanced learning on short notice.
Lessons are still presented by live teachers. Students can raise their hands and be called on to answer questions. There is a chat section on the side where students type their name in to indicate they're present. Additional tools are available to the teacher, such as something called Jamboard, where students can create their own sticky note with their idea and add it to the board, just like you would do in a brainstorming business meeting with real sticky notes on a whiteboard.
There are other tools and fun features like interactive, graphical assignments online for the students to do. The students also have workbooks they used each day. The teacher will say, "open your workbooks to page nineteen" as they begin their lesson. My daughter has the same workbooks, only in her case the volume of paper and space is three three-inch binders thick for EL (English Language) and four three-inch binders for math. She has VI notebooks for online class as well as independent learning work. In addition, there are reading books the students can read online that must be converted to braille for my daughter. And that's just the main things. My daughter's braillist sends a daily email with other things for us to print out and have ready for her as needed.
We had to come up with a rigorous organizational system to keep the pages of braille (which look like a sea of dots on white papers) from becoming a mess of confusion. Here's what the staging area for my daughter's daily school looks like:
If it seems like a lot, it is. Keep in mind though that our teachers at school manage this amount of material for each of the VI students they're working with. Can I just say again, I don't know how they do it with such grace?
It is at this point I want to send some thank you's out. First and foremost, to Mrs. B., my daughter's braillist, who is one of the most organized people I know. She has made a large collection of files not only easy to get to, but easy to print because she's formatted each of them so all I have to do is open each file up and send it to the embosser. It's not just naming the files that she's good at though. She has to take all the materials the other children are using and convert the materials in all kinds of formats into braille at the level my daughter has currently learned—no small feat. She is very good at this I'd venture to say, given how quickly she gets things to us. She makes it look effortless but from the small amount I've done in this vein, I know she makes a complex job look easy.
Secondly, I want to send thanks to Ms. Sample and Ms. Crossey, two more of the VI teachers my daughter works with. When they realized we were confused by the references to workbook pages and weren't keeping up with having materials printed and ready for my daughter each day, they did a mass printing and organizing job. Within forty-eight hours they had seven full books ready for us to pick up at school.
Another thanks from me to Ms. Sample and Ms. Crossey for surprising me with a box of printer paper already hole punched. This is a side story but one that bears telling. In March when lockdown happened and we ordered our embosser which prints braille (best decision ever) I ordered continuous feed braille paper. At the time, supplies were frightfully low from companies who produced the paper possibly due to COVID-19 and I was only able to find and order unpunched paper.
Brailled things tend to take up lots of room so putting them together so for small things we were doing nineteen-hole punching to create booklets. But we could punch three or four sheets at a time. For larger work, we would punch the standard three-holes, but we couldn't do many pages at a time there either. My husband got fed up and ordered a forty-sheet at a time three-hole punch (which is wonderful as well as fun to use). We were spending a lot of time punching holes though.
I decided to see if I could order paper that had both the three-hole as well as the nineteen-hole slots already punched in the side of the paper and by now, there was stock available I could order. That meant all we had to do was print and separate the continuously printed pages. We could then put the pages right in binders. Only it was sixty dollars for shipping for the heavy boxes of paper. So I elected to have the paper sent "Free Matter for the Blind" which as you might guess by the name, is free. Blind people can have printed material shipped to them as well as by them for free via the USPS. However, it's not fast shipping. But free was a lot better than $60, so I was on hold for the paper to arrive.
On Tuesday, after the holiday weekend, I stopped in at school where my daughter's teachers put in my trunk the binders of materials they'd printed out and organized. There was also a box. I figured it was more printed material for her. Much to my surprise, I got home to find they had given me a box of that precious, time-saving three/nineteen hole paper. I've never been so happy to have paper with little holes in it in my life.
It's a team effort to educate my daughter this year. We have her teachers at school doing their work to get the teaching done remotely. They are also getting us material both printed and electronically in a format we can give to my daughter so she can do the classwork with ease. My daughter doesn't have any idea the effort that happens behind the scenes, but as her mother and as someone who has a small window into the world of her teacher's jobs, I am exceptionally grateful to them.
The Big Boy Update: I drove my son to his day field trip to a camp site today. I put on his audiobook per his request but five minutes later I realized it was my audiobook. He said, "no, mom, don't change it, I want to keep listening," and we listened to it the whole way there. I had told him about the book the day before, saying I thought he might like it. I didn't mean to force it on him right in the middle of the book, but he didn't seem to mind. Part-way to the camp he said from the back seat, "my tooth fell out." I had to come up with a container for it and ended up dumping my little pill container into a tiny pocket of my purse so we could save his tooth for tonight. He wasn't bothered or even interested in his tooth falling out, what he wanted was me to press play so he could continue to listen to the audiobook.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter's legs are a total wreck of scabs and scrapes. She scrapes herself and gets bruises often, but this was bad as she was itching things and making large scabs. Today, instead of getting dressed like we normally require her to do, I told her she had permission to keep her long pajamas on—provided she didn't scratch her legs. So far, she's done a good job of trying to leave her legs alone.
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