Are you seriously that delusional? You really think people that work with these kids are in it for the money?? You really don’t have a clue do you?
There may have been some sarcasm involved in that message…
Damn, did Derleth whoosh me?
My bolding.
I think it is entirely honourable and helpful for disabled people to have classes which engage them in normal human interaction and perhaps help motor function, give the students happiness and give the carers/parents some free time. But delusional behaviour always disturbs me and if what others have said about ‘facilitated communication’ is true, I don’t like the sound of it.
If the students were truly as bad off as the OP states, they wouldn’t be in school. They would be, like you said, brain dead and on respirators. But clearly they’re not.
Now, do you really want someone else who doesn’t give a shit about you deciding the fate of your disabled loved one? There are a ton of problems with this.
How do you decide who deserves to live? IQ? Ability to live without assistance? Where is the line drawn? It’s hard to tell how much potential a person will have when they’re a baby. Do you give them until the age of 5? What happens when someone is born deaf, and “they” decide he’s not fit to live because he’s not showing signs of normal learning?
Yeah, I know your answer: someone else will figure it out. That’s because disability is not part of your life, and you don’t give a shit. Until, like the OP, you’re forced to - ohmygawd - look at disabled people. I’ll take my right to life over your mild discomfort, thanks.
Don’t worry, I am very used to explaining subtle concepts to people who have limited communication skills.
My comment to the OP included the information that the actual point of what I do is not creating art. See, I am here to serve the total human needs of the people who need my services. Creating artificial situations which approximate the life experiences which build your sense of self esteem is a part of that process. The quality of the art created is subjective, and entirely unrelated to the benefit gained by the practice. I am not willing to stipulate that what is created is not art, you understand, only that that is not the purpose of my efforts.
The quote where I asked the OP to go away and leave us alone because we were trying to make art here was a comment meant to show that my client believes that he is creating art, and I will support his belief because it is beneficial to his total human development to have that belief. It also shows that I find his opinion on art to be far more important than the OP’s, or, as it turns out, yours.
So, please let me try to be a bit less complex.
Please, fuck off, and try to stay out of our way. We’re trying to to create art here, and it is whole lot harder to do when some lame asshole who wants to feel superior to someone has to interrupt with their pseudo intellectual art criticisms. Do I whine about your velvet Elvis’s?
Tris
“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength; loving someone deeply gives you courage.” ~ Lao-Tzu ~
(Facilitated Communication is just one of a hundred academic methods foisted upon the population least likely to be able to detect a scam. The thing is, it doesn’t scam the guy getting the services, because if he is communicating better he’s happy, and if he cannot communicate at all, he’s probably pretty happy to be holding hands with someone who is actually spending time with him, and holding his hand. Me, I don’t use it, and never needed it. Non verbal people communicate with me just fine.)
Tris has a lot of good points, and I’d like to add my own.
I’ve had experience teaching in a severe and profound classroom. We, in part, used “facilitated” communication methods, and they greatly improved the students’ ability to communicate, and it significantly contributed to the quality of their lives.
Our most impaired students could not communicate in any well-known manner (speaking, sign language, etc.). We used a picture-exchange communication system. (I haven’t been trained in other systems, such as the “ouija board” method, so I can’t meaningfully comment on them.)
This picture-exchange communication system involves proprietary information, and should not be used except by teachers who have been specially trained by certified instructors. I imagine that many classrooms try to use communication systems without training, or they do it incompetently. Maybe this is the source of a lot of mistrust of these methods. Some of those teachers may be frauds, but we were not. For example, we never claimed that random scribblings represented anything.
Let me grossly oversimplify this method. There was a large velcro board on the wall. Little squares with icons on them were velcroed to it. And, for example, if a student wanted a drink of water, she went to the board, took off the square with a drawing of a glass of water, and handed it to me. In exchange, I gave her a glass of water. (We also had large velcro “books” of these icons that we could bring to the students who can’t walk around.)
That was the ONLY way that she could communicate to me that she was thirsty.
While that seems simple, it takes a long period of behavioral training for many of these students. They start from nothing. Many are extremely autistic. Some are nearly in a totally incapacitated state, yet even they could learn a little.
Here’s how Phase I teaching works. A velcro square with a depiction of a Cheerio on it is placed in her hand. I assist her by guiding her hand to another teacher, and I cause her to hand the other teacher the picture. In exchange, the other teacher gives her a Cheerio, which she happily eats. She is not doing any communicating. I’m “facilitating” the entire action. (How would this look if you visited my class on one of those days?) However, after some time, the student realizes that if she hands a teacher that picture, she will get a Cheerio in return. This could take hundreds of trials, depending on the ability of the student. Through a long, complicated process, this picture-exchange process is generalized to other things, and the students are trained to communicate their thoughts independently of facilitation (I am hungry, I want to play with the musical instruments, I’m too cold, I need to use the bathroom, etc. Many need assistance in using the bathroom. They can’t just walk over there and use it themselves.) Eventually, even the most profound students can learn a little vocabulary. The best students can can learn shapes, colors, sizes, foods, “I see ___,” “I smell ___.” If we reach Phase IV, students can also place the icons in sequence on strips of velcro in order to make rudimentary sentences, the easiest of which use the “I want” icon.
I’m very insulted that people call this a fraud. Unlike some people in this thread, I’ve had real experience with these students. There is no doubt that the lives of these students are drastically improved by helping them learn to communicate some of their thoughts about themselves and about their world. This fact is also proven by the reverse – when these students have an important thought that they can’t communicate, they get very frustrated, angry, and make vocalizations and gestures that express their distress.
Our parents, obviously, can also use this communication system, which profoundly helps the student’s (and parents’) lives at home. The students can communicate their needs, and their parents can help them. Are we scamming the parents?
We cared about our students and worked really hard for what looks like only a minimum of return. It was very difficult. Some students can only use a few words. However, it was rewarding. We helped our students meaningfully interact with, spend time with, and even communicate with other people. Other than that, they would live a boring life, closed off from all people.
There’s apparently multiple definitions of ‘facilitated communication’ around. Wonderful.
The one I was talking about was the one the majority of people know of: The Ouija board method. That is, the ‘facilitator’ guides the child’s hand around on some prop and bilks the parents by making the child ‘say’ ‘i wuv u’ and ‘giv carol money’ (assuming the ‘facilitator’ is called Carol). This kind has been debunked multiple times with the simple ‘facilitator sees one picture, child sees another’ trick. The fact ‘facilitators’ keep falling for it doesn’t speak well of their intelligence, but that should be obvious.
ragerdude, if you want to make sure people don’t think you are a subhuman vermin preying on the parents of disabled children you might could change the name of what you do. After all, the people who take care of teeth don’t call their profession ‘multiple rape and homicide’.
Triskadecamus and ragerdude as the mother of a profoundly disabled child I want to thank you for the work you’ve done with these kids. It is so hard to find people who have the patience to work with these kids. Let alone someone who seems to enjoy it.
I’ve never heard of or seen anyone using “The Ouija board method” and can’t imagine how it would work. I can swear however that the method used by rangerdude is effective in some cases as I’ve seen it first hand.
Lastly there are some of these works of “art” that have been proudly hung on my walls for 15 years now. They are a daily reminder of how precious the 14 years I was privileged to spend with my daughter were. I bless the people who dipped her hands it that paint and let her smear with abandon. They were the same people who loved her when she was there and greived her when she was gone.
Excuse me, ‘Tris’ I was simply pointing out you’d contradicted yourself, which you had, and trying to differentiate between criticising care of the disabled on one hand (which I do not) and the fucked-up ‘ouija board’ business Derleth was referring to (if indeed it occurs).
So screw you, you soppy septic sucker.
You are a sick puppy, Vinyl Turnip, a sick, sick puppy.
Wait a minute. You don’t agree that there are scammers who take advantage of parents who are very well intentioned and possibly desperate? What world do YOU live in where every person who claims to care for someone in an extremely vulnerable state is honorable?
My position in sum: A. real scammers who prey on the parents of severely disabled children are evil B. IF the art teachers are basically upfront with they are doing, and have not taken financial advantage of the parents, what’s going on in the OP is not a scam.
Has the OP even shown back up in this thread?