My sister has been on a month long clinical placement at our local hospital for her course which finished this Friday. Because of this she has been keeping some somewhat irregular hours and often missing dinner at home.
Our family is a little bit special when it comes to food. I have anaphylactic allergies. I've known about this since I was about seven after an unfortunate incident involving a cup of sesame seeds being added to a batch of homemade chocolate chip cookies. Whilst my allergies are somewhat severe (I'm meant to take an Epipen with me everywhere), awareness these days is pretty good and I'm used to having avoid the things that will kill me.
After becoming very ill a couple of years ago Katie was diagnosed as fructose and lactose intolerant. A food intolerance means that someone cannot digest a certain chemical properly. If the intolerant person continues to eat foods containing that chemical, it will simply sit in their intestines unabsorbed and over time impact their bowel. Once the bowel becomes impacted, the person usually becomes malnourished as the compound they can't absorb forms a cement-like lining that prevents other nutrients from being digested. This is different to Coeliac disease, which is an autoimmune disease whereby exposure to the gluten protein gliadin causes permanent changes, inflammation and damage to the villi of the small intestine.
People intolerant to fructose cannot eat most normal wheat based breads, pastas or cereals. It has nothing to do with the wheat and all to do with the fructose based sweetening agents. Because of this, our household had converted almost entirely to gluten-free rice pasta. At first we tried to convinced ourselves that we couldn't tell the difference, then we told ourselves that it, whilst different, it wasn't that bad. However, after months of weird, powdery rice pasta Mum treated the non-intolerant members of the household to NORMAL WHEAT BASED PASTA when Katie had an evening shift. Mmmmmmm.
On another food related note, I made little self-saucing chocolate puddings from scratch without a recipe and without measuring the ingredients. Sorry to sound very tryhardMasterchefwanker, but I was proud of my effort. They are stupidly easy and I am certainly nothing special in the kitchen, they did taste good.
My uni week started very differently as I spent the day at the Berendale school for my "special needs" placement. The point of the placement is for us health students to practice working with people who have communication difficulties. I spent the day with year 7s and year 8s. It was a fantastic day and the kids are pretty remarkable. Whilst they certainly have challenges (I saw four mild tantrums throughout the day), they are so aware of each others' limitations and have created a really positive and supported atmosphere for themselves.
The school looks and feels largely like a normal high school. Once you are inside the classrooms they do look a little more like primary school classrooms than senior school and the work the year 7s were doing was probably around year 1-4.
Being helpful to the teacher was challenging. I wanted to be as useful as I could but I soon worked out that assisting every child that asked wasn't the way to go. Lots of the kids have attention deficit type problems and it is really important for them to be able to build up the amount of time that they can go without attention for.
The emphasis at Berendale is on independent learning. Whilst the work the kids did was simple, they are expected to be able to become self-directed learners from a much the same age as kids in mainstream schooling. The year 7s were given a book full of worksheets which they had to have finished by Friday. They had to plan out by themselves using their timetable how many sheets they would do and when they were going to do them.
One activity the kids was doing was making a mobile (the dangley, ornamental type not the type you make phone calls on). The mobile was about the food groups as part of their module on healthy eating and nutrition.
Making the mobile is considered a complex task for the kids as it involved cutting out shapes, shorting the shapes into the food groups and then putting it all together using bluetac and string. Lots of the kids couldn't tie a knot by themselves and I really enjoyed teaching them. Firstly, I would show them and talk them through the process, broken down into simple steps. Then I got them to do one whilst I talked them through it. Lastly they did one by themselves whilst I was still watching just in case they got stuck. All the kids I helped could tie the knots in the string by themselves by the end of the class. Seeing the pride in their faces when they told their teacher that they'd "done it themselves" was very special.
It also reminded me of how much I enjoy coaching and tutoring.
The feelings were mixed out at Frankston this week. There were frustrations. A couple of subjects have been taking an age to give us our work back. We did get an essay back, the one I spoke about recently where the whole cohort was told that we didn't do very well. Thankfully I still did ok, but the feedback was sub par to say the least. I was deducted marks for neglecting to reference an introductory sentence which had no facts or ideas in it. It was just the sentence at the start of a paragraph introducing the subject matter to be discussed. I was also criticized on the grounds that my language use was both too simple and too complex. Both comments referred to individual word choices.
The marking schedule was also intrinsically flawed. If you achieved a "pass" mark in each assessed category, you would not have achieved enough marks to reach a pass grade for the whole essay.
I'm grateful that I still got a decent mark, given that so many smart, capable students did not. I know that as a result of this mediocre marking a lot of people will be feeling a lot more pressure going into that subject's exam than they probably would have anticipated.
I voiced my displeasure in my feedback survey about the teaching of the unit.
There were some lighter moments at uni this week. At one point all the paramedics students ended up with a 3 hour break which we spent a fair chunk of squishing about 8 of people around a 3 seater couch watching funny cat videos on youtube. At one point I was in tears from laughing so much.
| http://funniespet.com/funny-cat-pictures-2.html/funny-cats-pictures |
Tonight I will be planning my impending swotvac week. I haven't been this nervous about exams ever. I probably should have been in year 12, but I wasn't and that's a story for another day.
Much study awaits.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment =)