PACTT++General+Reflections

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Oct 15, 2009 I hope everybody's day today went well, in spite of the ugly weather. I just wanted to fill you in on what the PACTT group did, and I'd love to hear about your day. The students from PACTT did not come to Parker today as planned; when the PACTT staff heard about our flu outbreak, they decided to stay put. So we went to Access Living, an organization that advocates for rights for people with disabilities. Rahnee Patrick spoke to us, and the conversation was an interesting one, moving gradually from us talking about the accommodations that //we// make for people with disabilities to what the experience must be of someone who is disabled in some fashion, the experience, for instance, of showering in the morning with another human nearby to help, or of needing to rely on others for even the "simplest" activities. The talk was an eye-opening one for our group, particularly when Rahnee talked about her husband, a wheelchair-bound man, trying to navigate the art of flying on a commercial airliner. In fact, we are thinking of returning to Access Living in March to explore other topics after we have gotten to know our PACTT friends better.

Sept 21, 2009 We've just returned from our first day at PACTT, and it was a very "in-your-face" kind of day. It's hard to know exactly how to prepare our students for the experience. YouTube videos about autism seem to be about either austistic savants (which the PACTT students are not) or "austistic kids make good" pieces about austistic students who end up going to Yale. Longer films, like //Rainman//, romanticize the experience. And the more I say to the kids about how this is going to be a very "in-your-face" kind of experience, the more I seem to freak them out. In short, I can never really manage to put together the perfect first hour of this experience. The day did go well, though, even though we witnessed a short fight between two PACTT students, one of our students accidentally was bopped in the head, and Karen was "molested." Our students did a great job of trying to connect in various ways with the PACTT students (trying to play catch, trying to shoot baskets, asking quesitons), which can be a frustrating enterprise, a frustration that our kids dealt with very well. Overall, I think that the Parker kids enjoyed the experience and learned a great deal about a disorder that they knew very little about as the day started, which was one of the goals of the day. And one of our students even rode the el for the first time.

