Conclusion 4/26/16

Hello!

I have attached a link to my presentation below. I hope you can all attend on May 7th for the final presentations!

Grace

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1bU-Xn_2uRzxr-ms_ykzDyWRN5Rcvwf2jD7YP6amoGbw/edit?usp=sharing

Week Nine 4/13/16

Hello again! Today was my last day at my internship. It’s quite shocking how time has passed by so quickly. My day was as ordinary as any other day on the job, but one thing that was different was my mentality. I wanted to give today my very all.

As I instructed my regular morning class, things were a little different. Over the couple weeks, I have actually been training a very high-functioning student, Kyle. MaryAnn hopes that he himself can become an instructor eventually and I was in charge of getting him there.

Whenever we had these sessions, both Kyle and I worked with Andy.

Kyle needed to understand a few things about Andy before working with him: Andy’s OCD, his wandering eyes, and his issue with not staying inside his workspace. I then had to explain he will need to have a background of each of his students in the future because it directly correlated with how he was going to teach them.

After listening to me, Kyle took in everything and before he gives any instructions to Andy, he makes sure that Andy and he make firm eye contact. Kyle still has a little problem with keeping Andy on task when they’re not working for long periods of time and rather doing small tasks.

However all in all, I know that Kyle will make a great instructor one day.

Like any final day on a project, I began to reflect on what I learned over the past couple months. For three days a week, I saw this amazing, thriving community of hard-working individuals. Constantly learning and totally capable. However, once they step out into the world, they suddenly lose their independent light and live in the shadows. I find that the gap between them and society is not that large. They need support from people like MaryAnn, who see that they can improve and live a fulfilling life.

Every time a student here learns a new technique in jewelry or in welding, they are able to create high-quality products. These products are then bought by customers and sold to people in the outside community. The students take in pride that they were able to create something beautiful and “good enough” to be put up for sale in a show. And isn’t this sense of pride we all look for in life? To have accomplished something after hard work?

As the frequency of autism increases, the support for these individuals must do the same.

Thank you for following along with me for my senior research project!

Grace

Week Eight 4/6/16

Hello again! I cannot believe two months have gone by since I started to come to SEEDs. It’s very exciting to see how far the students have come since the beginning.

This week my hands got a little dirty. There was a lot of painting and a lot of filing, leaving my hands green and black.

When working with Alex and Ryan in the morning, I needed them to paint some metal stakes for the upcoming show. The challenging aspect was that these stakes needed to be painted in a certain manner. With a fan brush, the painting needed to be done in a way the black metal could still be seen through the green acrylic paint. I struggled with trying to explain this to the students because they both lacked listening skills. Alex caught on quickly after I showed him how the paint was supposed to look, but Ryan got a little carried away. The paint was already so pigmented and he was putting on way too many coats. So instead of trying to explain it again, I first added some water to the paint to dilute it a bit and then I held the paint cup in my hand so I could control how many times he could put his paintbrush in the paint. After denying his access a couple times, I kept on telling him to use the excess paint left on the stake. With both students, I constantly rubbed down the stakes with a paper towel to leave a nice spread out layer. All in all..they came out perfect! Just took a little extra work.

In the afternoon, I worked with Breanna and Andy. We polished the garden tags that we’ve been making for over a month. Using scotch brite to scrub off the dirt and metal, we all ended up with black fingers. Breanna worked very hard and she made sure to get every last bit of dirt off of the garden tags. Andy on the other hand simply rushed through the tags that I was giving him and wasn’t exactly paying attention to how well he was working. To keep him on the same pace with Breanna, I gave him a rougher scotch brite and told him to apply a bit more pressure to completely polish the tags. Like the morning class, they both worked very well and we finished our products on a good note.

After having my own class every week, I realized the instructor is constantly thinking of ways to either use a student’s certain behavior to help the outcome of a product or thinking of ways to counter a student’s certain behavior to do the same thing. For example, I needed to think of ways to counter Ryan’s overcoating. This isn’t a skill specific to a person who has worked with people with autism. This is just common sense.

Thanks for reading!

Grace