Walk along the river

Thuan Center TUESDAY

Thuan Center TUESDAY photos A

Thun Center TUESDAY

Breakfast for me is oatmeal ( I brought from home ) and delicious coffee I bought at the supermarket here. The free breakfast is well, “din ky” for me.

I enjoy a nice Skype call with Jim, Fraser, Erin, and Brody. I take the computer outside and walk around so they can see this “jungle resort”. As they sit down for dinner back in Gloucester and I head off to the Thuan Center.

Judy and I make a plan for our day:

We get ready to observe the teaching for the first two hours. We ask the “therapists in training” who also observe the teaching to notice; 1. what auditory techniques she is using 2. how and when she involves the parent 3. what she has planned for the lesson. Our “lecture plan” today is practical, hands on – how to plan an individual lesson based on individual education plan.

However, as most things go, when we get to the school we have to change our plan! The kids we were going to observe are with the GFCHL audiologist.

Talking with Phuong, Judy’s interpreter, as we wait, we are surprised to learn she is a nun. She is a Sister of the Holy Cross, took her vows 16 years ago. She tells us she wakes up at 4 am every morning, attends Mass. My interpreter is Sister Sang, a sister of St Paul of Chartres.

I coach the therapists on a lesson I observed yesterday. In two hours I go through 5 pages of Auditory-Verbal techniques, delineating what is expected of a therapist doing Auditory-Verbal Therapy. The therapists I coach are incredible. They hang on every word the interpreter says. I talk about the importance of reading 10 books a day. How kids need the knowledge background for their language and listening development. I share my stories of Mabel and Alexander Graham Bell.

Mabel, AGB’s wife, was deaf. She said the thing that helped her understand spoken language was her love of reading. She read books so she would know about any subject someone might talk about with her.

This morning session makes me glad I came to Vietnam to teach. I love connecting with these therapists in a more intimate way. As therapists we have to expect a lot of ourselves in planning and executing these lessons with these families. Therapist to therapist we are on the same ‘wavelength’, though they know they need a lot of improvement. I wish I videotaped this 2 hour coaching session so the other teachers could learn from this, too.

Judy does an amazing small group session focusing on speech evaluation and teaching. I wish we could have videotaped that.

We enjoy another wonderful lunch. I eat steamed beet greens and a hot cabbage salad with rice. It is hot again today, maybe 100 F? - really steaming hot, like an oven.

After lunch I give our “Activities and Auditory-Verbal Strategies”. I love showing videos of our AVCC students to show what can happen when parents follow all Ten Principles of Auditory-Verbal Practice. The therapists love hearing the ‘ahaha” airplane song, the ‘beep beep” car song. They laugh as they translate in to Vietnamese!

Again Judy and I coach small groups of therapists while observing with one therapist teaching one child. I have to dive in to the therapy and share some of my favorite activities and books. Modeling Brown Bear, Brown Bear I learn a few Vietnamese phrases, too!

We all regroup back in the very hot classroom for question and answers, more on planning and using the A-V Ongoing Assessment. Judy shows some inspirational videos of her students. We hope this is awakening these therapists to the potential of the kids they are teaching. We encourage them to “change what they are doing” so they can start to see the kind of progress possible when you teach with appropriate assessing, planning, teaching through audition, and coaching the parents.

Judy tells the therapists; “Don’t be discouraged. See it as a new sunshine. It will be very exciting.”