Well that's not how I would do it...

Today was day one of observations. Awesome!  My co-intern and I were welcomed to Atlanta by getting stuck in traffic because...well it's Atlanta and there was an accident.  We were 5 minutes late, but luckily the first class we were observing was late as well! I'm thankful for understanding supervisors.  They know the traffic and only want us there in one piece, even if we're late.  But if worse comes to worse...I'll just camp out at whatever school I'm supposed to be at for the next day.

I saw great activities that I can use in my sessions.  I really enjoyed the first supervisor.  She is so talented and reminds me a lot of my 3rd grade teacher, Mrs. Faith, who made a huge impact on my life!  She had some down time between activities, which is bad!  She was aware of that and explained why you don't want that to happen, but she was having ipod issues.  So, it was nice to see that even a professional has her off days!  The only bad thing I could say about the first observation of the day is this:  there was no sanitizing instruments between classes.  I feel sick already.

The second observation of the day was completely different.  I didn't enjoy it at all.  I did pick up a few ideas that I could adapt.  There was so much down time between activities and it was not by accident or because of an ipod malfunction.  It was simply just because.  My professor from Queens would have torn this therapist a part, piece by piece.  Just so you know, as Jeremy would say, during this internship I will be working with a lot of kids with Autism from mild, moderate, to severe/profound.  So, in this session there were some mild kids, but they were still pretty low functioning.  They played a game where they chose "simple" questions from a basket and they had to try to read the question.  Well, these were questions like "Do you have a favorite song? If so, what is it?, In what state were you born?, Do you have a favorite instrument, etc"  They actually became worse.  These questions can be difficult for normal functioning individuals.  Not only that, but there was poor behavioral management in the group.  I was very disappointed in this observation.  No doubt this supervisor is qualified for the job and knows more about it than I, but... "well that's not how I would do it".

Day 2 of observations starts way too early! =)