Here's what happens when you leave a tutor with poor motor planning skills in charge of a tutorial on wheelchair mobility...

A multitude of blunders, of course.

Today I managed to tip a student out of a wheelchair going forwards down a kerb. Not quite the demonstration I was hoping for. Luckily she had a quick reaction speed and managed to jump free before she hit the ground.

That was after I'd fallen at the last hurdle of disassembling and reassembling a manual wheelchair. All was going well until I got to putting the footplates back on at the end. There's nothing worse than having twenty pairs of eyes watching you struggle with what should be the easiest part of the whole job.

And all of that happened after I arrived somewhat underprepared, not having watched the mile long list of videos on using various items of equipment that are part of the required pre-reading and viewing for the session. Every other week I've watched them. I didn't get to it this week. So obviously it would follow that a student would ask me about a piece of equipment from one of the videos, that I had sitting at the front of the room and couldn't work out what it was or what to do with it. I'd hoped that I might be able to ask my teaching partner later about it so I could show the students in a future session.

So the student asked if we were going to have a demonstration of the equipment (something that I now know is designed to assist with lifting a wheelchair into the boot of a car). And then I had to own up and say I didn't know what it was. I ended up having to get her to demonstrate to the rest of the group. Embarrassing.

One of those teaching days that I would like to erase from memory forever. Or the next best thing, I hope I'll learn from all the mistakes and do a better job next time around.

I'll be praying for a better day tomorrow, when I have to do a formal memory assessment with a guy who's had a stroke and now has some memory loss. I've never done the test before. I looked at it last week and thought it wouldn't be too difficult. Hope that turns out to be true.

I feel like I'm on a really steep learning curve at the moment. It's not an easy place to be.

Last day of the school holidays...

...hooray!

Today we did one of our regular holiday activities, morning tea at the lighthouse. We generally get to see a few dolphins playing.

The kids did a bit of running around too. Always guarantees a good afternoon sleep for them both. And some quiet time listening to stories on CD for the big guys.

The Labor "faceless men"

They've been around longer than you think. Here's a great post on their history and their relevance (or lack thereof, actually) to recent events in the Labor Party.

I love reading educational blog posts like this one. Thanks Jon!

Easy and yummy winter dinner

Lamb shank, fennel and pearl barley scotch broth. Recipe here.

Apart from all the labour intensive chopping of vegies to go into it, it was a pretty easy dinner. I made it in the slow cooker and I didn't bother browning anything, I just threw it all in and cooked it on low for about six hours. By then, all the lamb had fallen off the bones so all that I needed to do was take the bones out and serve it up with some bread. The fennel had mellowed out so there was just a hint of its flavour rather than having an overpowering aniseed taste.

You can add other vegetables to it if you like. I had a few over-ripe tomatoes on the kitchen bench that I used up. We got an extra bag of potatoes in our online shopping order this week so I chopped up a few of those and put them in as well. An extra carrot or two. A bit more pearl barley than what the recipe said. It easily served our family of six with enough for seconds and probably a bit more for me to take for lunch at work later in the week.

Yum. Just the right dinner to sustain me for the evening ahead as I'm revisiting how to prescribe a wheelchair ahead of the student tutorial tomorrow morning (not a topic I'm overly familiar with...)