school hearing screenings

This week I got to have my first real world experience in my new field. For the class Audiological Evaluation, we all signed up to volunteer with school hearing screenings in the public schools. I know I am not going to be an audiologist, but since speech/language is so connected to hearing, they are good skills to have, and an SLP has to rule out hearing loss as the cause of speech/language impairments or know if it is a contributing factor. Anyway. I was both excited and nervous because I did not want to make any mistakes. I was glad it worked in my schedule to sign up for an elementary school because the kids are so cute and they care about wanting to do a good job. It was fun, and I performed my task well. It was interesting to go over audiograms with the audiologist and ask her questions. I identified one hearing loss that was not previously know to the school district. It may not have been a new loss (and I hope, for the kid's sake, that it is not) because he was new to the district and was previously at a private school that apparently didn't do hearing screenings because they didn't have a case history for him. When I screened him, I wasn't positive my results were correct because it really was just one frequency in the middle of others where he did not respond. When a kid doesn't pass, he eventually is given a diagnostic test by the audiologist to find thresholds. I got to see his audiogram, and he truly has a notch of hearing loss only at one frequency. Exciting for me that I found something, but sad for the kid.

Another fun part of the day is that we got to eat school lunch. It's funny that I was so excited about it because I stopped eating regular school lunch somewhere around 4th or 5th grade because I didn't really like it. I guess it is novel again. This school lunch was incredibly "Boulder": offerings included tofu hot dogs on whole wheat, an amazing salad bar (how many elementary-aged kids do you know who eat salad bar?) with all kinds of toppings including chicken breast and vegetables grown at the school by the kids (so awesome), and individual soy milks. Loved it.