Teacher workshop

Monday through Wednesday we had a workshop for teachers of the deaf, sponsored by Vision Trust. There were teachers from all over the country. Each of the three days we had about thirty participants.

The team that came did an excellent job. This kind of training is much needed, and much appreciated. The teachers participated with enthusiasm. All went away from the workshop with new teaching materials in hand, many of which they had made themselves at the workshop, and fresh ideas for teaching their deaf students.

There was a lot of interest in having more workshops next year.

Maria and I have been asked to present three days of afternoon workshops for the public school teachers in Northern Santo Domingo, many of whom are Christians, interested in working with the deaf. Those will be next Wednesday through Friday. A few of these teachers actually have deaf students in their classes, with no interpreters or support services at all--not a good idea. There are also a couple who have deaf children themselves.

Now you cannot prepare teachers of the deaf from scratch in three days, but we will give them a basic orientation to deafness, and some survival signs. We hope that we can pique their interest to follow up and get more training.

New Location

It looks like the school will have a new location. It is, in fact, the same place they were talking about before. They keep changing their minds! Last I heard, however, is that there are going to be some offices there for their education dept., and the school will have the needed classrooms, all day long. Keep this in prayer, because the time is getting short; at this point Maria, the director, needs to know for sure that she has classrooms.

Now that place is in very very bad shape. But if they are going to put their offices there, the chances are pretty good that they are going to give it a once over. They even had an engineer over looking at it the other day. This is another one of those times that I don't want to count my chickens before they hatch! Things change too much here to depend on them until someone has signed on the dotted line. :)

The place is on the market however, so if it should be sold sometime during the school year, next year the school will be looking for yet another place. I told Maria that we should call it the Mobile School for the Deaf, since we move so much! :)

Monday-Wednesday Vision Trust is sponsoring a workshop for teachers of the deaf. We've invited teachers from as far away as the Haitian border, and expect to have a good group. Teachers from the US will be sharing some of their teaching techniques, and also helping the participants to make some of their own teaching materials.