[blindkid] School cane O/M issues

[holly miller]

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
>
>
>