This Active Life -- November 2002

People

Prescription for Penmanship

Kathleen Adams of Nebraska makes sure that doctors with poor penmanship dot every i and cross every t. Because when doctors scribble, Isordil can become Plendil, and that's a prescription for trouble.

After 29 years as an elementary teacher and reading specialist for the Omaha public schools, Adams jumped at the opportunity to help doctors prevent prescription errors when invited to work with them by her former school superintendent, who is also the chairman of the board at the Children's Hospital.

"If a physician's writing is illegible, people can die," says Dr. Stephen Lazoritz, one of Adams' pupils. Twenty percent of medication errors are due to handwriting that is misread, he says, admitting that his own handwriting was very poor before working with Adams.

Rushing and jumbling print and cursive writing are common errors of Adams' students. She usually advises them to print because it's clearer.

Her lessons start with an analysis of the doctor's writing sample provided by the nurses from earlier in the week. Then, she circles areas that need improvement and watches the doctor write. She'll point out that the letter j needs to hang below the line and emphasizes the need to "make tall letters tall and small letters small." In one extreme case, Adams could read only a few of 100 words a doctor wrote. After practicing Adams' methods, he improved so much she could read 96 words out of 100.

Adams is proud to use her teaching skills to help save lives. "There's no lesson plan to follow. I've done on the spot diagnosis from working with children needing remediation, so it comes naturally."

--Lorinda Bullock

Ambassador by Mail

Has Flat Stanley made it to your neck of the woods? If Virginia member Katherine Hairston has her way, he sure might.

For those out of the loop, Flat Stanley gets his name from the children's book by Jeff Brown. When Stanley is squashed flat by a bulletin board, he takes advantage of the mishap by traveling in an envelope to visit his friends.

Students in hundreds of schools around the world have taken hold of the idea by creating their own Flat Stanleys and sending them, along with journals, to others. When you receive a Flat Stanley, you're asked to show him around and chronicle his experiences in the journal. You then return Stanley and the journal, so students can see where he's been and what he's done.

"I was substituting at a local school and found that they were sending Flat Stanleys to other people," says Hairston. "So I decided to give them the names of some retired people I knew of to expand the areas where they had made contact." She had students send Flat Stanleys to NEA-Retired members in Nevada, Delaware, and New Mexico, and they, in turn, made sure to include Flat Stanley in their travel plans.

The result? Students got a good geography lesson--as well as a few laughs. "Some of the retired members embellished the journals and made them very humorous," says Hairston. This past fall, Hairston took Flat Stanley on a tour of Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon, and other monuments and parks. She phoned from the road to tell This Active Life that she's run into another Flat Stanley fan--from Australia!

An Education Legacy

If you grew up in the Díaz de León family, you learned very early the value of education.

Did the lessons stick? Well, four children of Ignacio and Beatrice Reyes de León graduated from college, served for years as teachers in the public schools--and are now members of NEA-Retired in Texas. Combined, the Díaz de León children--from left in photo, Beatrice Sierra, Efrén Díaz de León, Mary Ellen Regalado, and Esperanza Saenz--taught a total of 142 years. Between them, they taught every grade, in subjects like physical education, science, English, and art. Efrén also was a counselor and principal.

"I think this story belongs to our parents," says Esperanza Saenz. Growing up, "it was understood that we'd all go to college." Though the family did without, "we weren't allowed to have jobs during the school year," so that they could focus on schoolwork.

"They deprived themselves so we could be educated, pointed us in the right direction, and gave us a great, big push," adds Efrén Díaz de León. Beatrice Sierra remembers: "My mother only went to school through the fourth grade, but she read the newspaper from cover to cover."

"When my father died he didn't really leave us anything but education," says Sierra, "that's the best inheritance we've got."

--Lorinda Bullock