RE-DIRECTION

The 8 month mark has passed now and there's 4 months left to go. School has been up and down and all around. As the teachers and staff gain more confidence in me, I've started to think of bigger and better things. However, things have become too big, out of my depth and unachievable in the little time that I have left. In this post, I'm continuing on my line of "not my profession, but I'll have a crack anyway". This time, I've been attempting to be a Music Therapist. For example, there's an extra-curricular group that does "Movement to Music". Unfortunately for most of the time, the children spend their time walking around to the same music CD every week. There's little structure and the goals of the class are very unclear. I am a Physiotherapist and therefore a movement specialist AND I love music so I'd be the right person to help this group along, right? Or so I thought... I LOVE music. I also happen to think that the Classical music genre is a powerful tool for children with disabilities. I haven't researched it, nor have I discussed this with a music therapist, but I'm sure I'd be somewhere on the right track. Naturally, I thought that the chidlren would also enjoy other types of music that wasn't raggae or samba beated, remixed top 20. I started to explore the idea of classical music after our psychological nightmare run-in (see http://mobilisedmanda.blogspot.com/2011/02/mothers-pain.html). Which, by the way, a big thank you to Sabura and Claire for their words of advice. Our little man is enjoying school A LOT more with positive experiences and activity redirection. My idea came to me when my housemate asked me to load some Classical music to help her get to sleep at night. She came back to me the next day saying it was exactly what she needed to calm down, relax and eventually fall asleep. I thought - why not compile a CD of Classical music for the children when they're having their rest time OR when a wave of anxiety was going through the classroom and Children were starting to misbehave. So away I went and burnt a CD of the same songs I had given my friend to help her sleep. I handed it over to the classroom teacher who, apart from being bored listening to it, felt rather sleepy after listening to it for 2 minutes. It was rather successful and has since been used for rest time at 1 o'clock in the afternoon. The children have been calm after lunch and have been enjoying their rest time. Now, back to the movement to music class. We'd recently had lectures from a linguist and teacher of the deaf about learning through stories. His main message was that children learn best through experience and that experience through a story made classroom activities more meaningful and motivating than teaching in discrete topics. Another idea floated into my mind - a story to music: Peter and the Wolf! For those who are not familiar with Peter and the Wolf, it's a story that's set to music. The story is about a boy who captures a wolf with the assistance of his animal friends and each animal is represented by a different instrument of the orchestra. Each section of narration is followed by about 45 seconds of instrumental music that reflects the storyline. It's at this point that I should let you know about the attention span of my colleagues at school. It is almost impossible to hold a conversation with the staff at school for one of two reasons - either you're interrupted rudely by another adult or child at the school or your conversation topic is too "kai-valagi" (western) to be interesting to maintain interest. Unless of course you're using an unprecedented amount of slap-stick humour, you're bound to lose interest in your audience very quickly. Undivided attention is a rare commodity at school. I find myself too often having a one-way conversation with a closed ear attached to a head of a colleague's head.

So I requested that the two teachers that took "movement to music" sit down with me during one lunch time and listen to the entire 20 minutes or so of Peter and the Wolf. I know, you're all shouting at me: "How is this culturally appropriate?", "Have YOU seen an orchestra in Fiji?", "ATTENTION SPAN!!", "Abstract ideas don't really work with this audience...", "You're professional boundary just ended about one kilometer behind us!!!!". However, I was so convinced that I had come up with a brilliant idea. Unfortunately, it was only 10 seconds into the musical section that the teachers started telling children off, picked up conversations with mothers that entered the room and looking away everytime a child ran past the room. By the end of it, I had realised how much of a bad idea this was when the teachers themselves where falling asleep at the end of the 20 minutes. What a "head-against-the-brick-wall" moment.

Yep. I should've seen it coming. How on earth could I EVER think that Peter and the Wolf could work in Fiji? I had visions of the children achieving gross motor goals while re-enacting different characters in the story and also incedently learning about instruments of the orchestra. I was so set with this idea that I was completely disheartened when it wasn't taken up with prompt enthusiasm. I think I had been yearning for some sort of approval or appreciation for my self-proclaimed awesome idea. How very wrong I was.

The lesson learnt from this whole fiasco is that I need to stick to my area of expertise. Stay with tried and true therapies that I know will work and focus on my assignment outcomes. Don't try to be someone I'm not. Don't try to offer professional advice and enhance a curriculum that I don't have the expertise to improve. I think the feeling of dejection was magnified by the fact that my efforts seem to have been going un-noticed recently that I was craving some sort of attention. I was so put-out that I was thinking "why o why am I even here at this school in the first place??!?" I just completely lost faith in what I was doing at the school that I decided to take a day off to redirect my thoughts and aims for my time here in Fiji. So there it is. The downer and the reality check. BUT it's not all bad news, for this story is "to be continued..."

THE CRACKS ARE STARTING TO SHOW

Yep. The cracks are starting to show. Literally. Today, I arrived at school. I always arrive at school. But today was different. I was starting to lose motivation and had recurring instances of wanting to bash my head against a brick wall (more on that later). However, I woke up this morning and thought: "Right. I won't let annoying little things get to me and I won't be put off by teachers forgetting stuff that I'd told them over and over again. I'm going to push through and I'm going to focus on the little wins along the way". Little did I know that I would find this on my arrival to school:



A massive 3 metre long crack under the tiles in the middle of the therapy room floor. Something had happened to the floor of the therapy room that had made an entire row of tiles buckle.

It is so incredibly unmotivating to work in an environment like this. I was concerned that maybe this crack was the warning signs of an impending land slide. My counterpart joked that it was an earthquake and our therapy area just happened to be the epicentre. Great. Just brilliant. I'm very glad she was just joking.

Also, while I'm on the topic of really horrible OH&S issues, I'm pretty sure I've described a bit about the rat poo that we keep finding everywhere. Apart from eating my glue, they also seem to like dying in our hydrotherapy pool:



Again, another demotivating factor to remind you that your workplace environment is completely sub-standard and approaching a state of disrepair. It's really annoying to have to dust away the rat and mouse poo that finds itself on top of all of your equipment. I'm glad this one died but did it really have to die in the pool???

As for the bashing my head against a brick wall, I have been constantly teaching teachers how to teach handwriting. Again, it's not part of my qualification, but as the proxy school Occupational Therapist, I have been given the task of coordinating the roll out of the handwriting program. After harping on about ensuring that the children didn't write their letters too cramped, I found a teacher-made worksheet today that had an entire bunch of h's, n's, k's and m's squished in on one line.

So, I'm not going to focus on all the other little annoying things that have been a bit hard to deal with. I'll end it there. I hope you enjoyed the pictures!

SIGNING AWAY THE LANGUAGE BARRIER

Last year, my housemates and I decided to tackle the Fijian Language. We took lessons each week for 12 weeks to learn how to speak Fijian. Unfortunately, our ability to pick up the language has been minimal. It's difficult to understand because when spoken, it sounds like an incredibly long sentence without pauses, breaks, articles or discreet words. It's hard to pick out nouns from verbs from articles. Additionally, one can get by very easily without speaking Fijian. It doesn't really have many advantages when you're out and about and everyone speaks some English anyway. There's also the other half of the population who speak Hindi and don't know a word of Fijian, so English becomes the common language in most situations.

At school the children speak English, albeit in a simplified, broken manner. This is mainly due to lack of exposure and intellectual impairment. For example, the other day one of the students asked me: "You have my change? I keep here then on Wednesday, I already bring. You keep for Friday sports?" which translates to: "Can you please keep my change of clothes with you until Friday? Then I don't have to bring another change of clothes for Friday sports."

It's not quite an English-as-a-second-language issue, as I've heard other children who are not enrolled at the school speak in sentences that are better formed than those of the students at our school.

So anyway, the point is, there is a mode of communication through English that is somewhat reliable at school and in the community.

However, this has not been the case for the hearing impaired children and teachers at our school. The ONLY means of communication so far has been through the school's sign language interpreter. I feel really bad that I haven't been able to communicate appropriately with the teachers and students at school. Even some of the teachers are still unable to communicate in sign language. This may be due to a number of different reasons, but my view is that out of respect to the entire school community, those working at the school MUST learn sign language.

That is what I've started to do in the past 2 weeks.

I've attempted to pick up as much as I can at school but the students sign REALLY quickly and at times they are inaccurate with their signs. Small nuances that make a huge difference in differentiating between signs such as "I", "my", "I'm" and "me". Being one of the teaching staff at school as well, I feel that it's appropriate to learn to increase the children's exposure to proper sign language. Therefore, there's been no excuse but to take myself along to the the Deaf Association twice a week to learn Fijian Sign Language. Apparently it's very similar to AusLAN but what the differences actually are, I'm not entirely sure.

One more thing - I've been trying to show the whole school that incorporating gross and fine motor skills into classwork to demonstrate concrete examples will enhance learning experiences. This includes the hearing impaired children because I believe that it's not only the "physically impaired" children that require maximised exposure to gross and fine motor skills. Again, I may be over-stepping my boundaries. Last week I wasn't a psychologist and this week, I'm definitely NOT a classroom teacher. However, I do feel that doing gross and fine motor activities, combined with instructions in signed and voiced language can't be doing much harm to the children.