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This course has been an amazing learning experience. First coming in I was a little skeptical about what we were going to be doing and if what we were doing was actually going to have an effect. I was extremely nervous to work with someone who was genuinlly seeking help and was worried that we weren't going to be able to provide it.
Looking back it's so incredible to be able to see the outcomes. I enjoyed going to UCF every week to meet with C.S. and to see everyone else in the class work with their clients. By the end I was shocked to notice the differences that C.S. had made since the first day of class. The same for all the clients. At the last days, everyone was always so talkative and had something to say and input during group discussions-which is amazing since we are working with people with a language disorder. One thing that was always interesting was the different range of communication and lack there-of that each client had. They all have suffered the same but with different outcomes. It was so good to see a class full of people who were willing to work towards making an improvement, on all ends: the student, the client, and the teacher.

For my final project, my initial idea was to research the differences between a left hemispheric stroke and a right. I was then going to take pictures of objects from two different perspectives that would be able to illustrate these differences and how people view the world and objects because of damage done by the stroke. I began researching though and could not stop researching. I became extremely interested in the concept of language and how even a person with damage to the right hemisphere still has to recover from certain aspects of communication disabilities. This all stemmed because of the six clients we worked with over this semester, I had been partnered with the only one who has suffered a right-hemispheric stroke. So throughout this course, my partner and I have had a different journey of learning different ways to communicate than the others.

(http://www.dh.org/body.cfm?id=872)

This first image, from the Doylestown Hospital Stroke Resource Center simple shows the what happens when a stroke occurs.  "A stroke is an interruption of the blood supply to any part of the brain. When part of the brain does not get blood flow due to a blocked or ruptured blood vessel, that part of the brain starts to die." (http://www.dh.org/body.cfm?id=872) The effects of stroke differ depending on the severity as well as the location.

( http://www.undergrad.ahs.uwaterloo.ca/~aktse/unilateral.html)

Someone who suffers a right hemispheric stroke often has a complication called left-side neglect. When the right side of the brain experiences a stroke, areas of the brain that function in attention and certain sensory outputs. Left-side neglect is the tendency for a person, due to damage in the visual and perceptual fields in the brain, to essentially forget or ignore objects or people on their left side.

 (www.acoustics.org/press/152nd/Liu.html)

In terms of communication functions, the left side is important for recognizing pitches and tones which often determine the seriousness or playfulness of a comment. 

Damage to the right-hemisphere will cause a disorder known as aprosodia. Aprosodia is characterized by the inability of a person to properly convey and interpret prosody, or the emotions of language, such as the ranges of rhythm, pitch, stress, and intonation. This is important because of its intristic, intellectual, and emotional context of a sentence.
            For the duration of this class many things were observed dealing with damage to both the right and left hemispheres of the brain. The client that I was partnered with was faced with different circumstances than the other participants, but it was also soon realized that his disability still impaired what we would see as “normal” functions.