Loving Life

It’s been a while, once again, since I last posted, and things in my life have been simply amazing both professionally and personally. I’ll keep the “personally” to myself as a constant reminder to be grateful for all the changes in my life, but for you readers, I wanted to share all my amazing professional actions from the last twelve months!

A year ago, I finished working as a behavioral aide, one-on-one with a third grader and began working as a learning clinician at a learning center. The learning center, Lindamood-Bell, focuses mainly on word recognition and reading comprehension, but it also works on math for some students. Their foundation for teaching/learning is based on the dual coding theory. I’ll be writing about that in another blog. For me, though, I have loved every moment. I have instructed several students from age 5 all the way up to 25. Their improvement has been dramatic. To provide a few examples, I worked a few students who started by recognizing the letters of the alphabet. When they finished their programs, they were reading at a minimum of two grades higher than when they initially tested. I’ve had other students who could read just fine, but had no idea what they were reading. This type of learning disability is called “hyperlexia”. With these students we start with simple descriptions of pictures and move on to sentences, then paragraphs, then stories. It always amazes me the progress students can make in just a few weeks and how their confidence levels completely change. I’m only working a few hours a week there while managing my epilepsy, but every child I’ve met there has impacted me.

Second, in November of last year, I began an unpaid internship/volunteer position as a research assistant at the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. I assisted a post-doctoral fellow with a study she was completing on how the brain stem responds to sounds. Throughout the study, I learned how to schedule participants, run tests written in MathLab, and set up MEG sessions. It was a very steep learning curve for me.

Whenever I’m involved in something that fulfills my passion, I turn into a perfectionist, and I catch every single thing I did wrong. So, I was a bit hard on myself. The preliminary study finished at the end of April, and the post-doctoral fellow presented her findings at a conference in Texas. Of course, I’ll not be credited in any part of the study, but I have the satisfaction of knowing I assisted in a successful Brain Sciences research, and my work mattered.

Finally, I attended the Infant and Early Childhood Conference, held in May of this year in Tacoma, Washington. I didn’t know what to expect, but I assumed some of the sessions would be helpful to education advocates as well as educators. My favorite session was with Jocelyn Manzanarez of Musically Minded.

She taught us, mostly educators, the importance of rhyme, rhythm, surprise, and music starting from infancy through kindergarten. And, she provided us with copies of some of the songs she uses with children and other early childhood educators. It brought to mind the dual coding theory followed by Lindamood-Bell, which again, I’ll focus on in a follow up blog. I have since followed her on her mailing list, Facebook, and Twitter. Her staff includes those who have completed degrees in music and/or music education, but their work is based on sound peer-reviewed research. She happily sent me the research she is currently following as she continues to craft her career. I highly recommend parents of young children and early educators to check out her website. If you’re not local to the Puget Sound, I am confident she can recommend organizations that are similar to hers.

So, that has been my last twelve months. I’m still living in the Seattle area and finding more ways to hone my career, and I hope to share more excitement as 2017 continues. Thanks for reading, and keep coming back for updates!