[blindkid] School cane O/M issues

[Doreen]

Holly
thank you for the CHUCKLE!!! You hit it on the head!
Doreen


holly miller wrote:
> I'm beginning to think there really is only one O&M person out there and
> she's just teleporting herself from school to school all across the
> country.  Or maybe she cloned herself LOL!
>
> Holly
>
> On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 1:06 AM, Richard Holloway <rholloway at gopbc.org>wrote:
>
>   
>> Holly,
>>
>> It isn't just the low vision kids who encounter resistance to cane use from
>> O&M professionals. We ran into huge opposition to our daughter using a cane
>> at 18 months and she has no light perception. We were told she was "too
>> young" and would have to "unlearn bad habits" if she started using a cane so
>> early. Rest assured we gave her the cane and insisted she use it for O&M.
>> (They wanted to use big awkward "pre-cane devices" made of PVC with the kids
>> her age.)
>>
>> On the folding cane, absolutely there are times for that and it is a
>> personal decision in any case but all too often the professionals want to
>> shift to a different primary cane because it is what the teacher is used to
>> or prefers for whatever reason. We've had some battles over that too. The
>> bottom line is she's our daughter and this is our adaptation of preference.
>> Our choice needs to be respected for our child.
>>
>> One interesting footnote. While one of our later O&M teachers (who also
>> preferred a different cane) did ultimately comply with our insistence for
>> using the NFB cane, she continued to use her own more conventional teaching
>> cane with the heavy tip and so forth. A couple of years later, we got her to
>> a National NOPBC / NFB convention. She left the convention with an NFB cane
>> and used it from then on as her teaching cane-- another small step for our
>> kids...
>>
>> Richard
>>
>>
>>
>>     
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