With FM units, you have to make sure you find someone in the school that you really trust in order to store the unit. You can’t take it home, and you have to make sure that it’s in a safe place so that you can charge it overnight. It has to be someplace accessible so you can get it in the morning when you first come to school. It’s a very expensive item, so you have to be very careful with it.
When I had my FM unit with my guidance counselor it was hard because sometimes she might leave early and I wouldn’t be able to get into her office with my hearing aids and my FM unit. So I had to find somewhere that’s always open, that’s always accessible so I could always get in to get my equipment. Otherwise you have no choice but to take it home with you, which you’re not allowed to do.
It’s hard, because sometimes you don’t remember until you are already downstairs at the end of the day, and you have to go all the way back upstairs – depending on where you stored it – to find that the person is not there anyway.
I had one teacher that kind of fussed about it – what is this, why do I have to wear it? Then I explained it, and he understood. All my other teachers understood and they were fine with it. You have to explain the benefit of it – that it will help you do better in their class.
I have left it in one class and started to go to another, and my teacher followed me down the hallway with it!
The FM is more useful in classroom situation where there’s a lot of group work going on, and the teacher is still talking or the class is noisy and you need to hear the teacher. On some sets you have different buttons to let you hear at different levels: the one with the line at the type narrows it down to the teacher’s voice alone, so it makes it easier to hear the teacher over the noise in the classroom.
If I was going to build a better FM, I would make it much smaller because it’s kind of weird looking on the teacher. I think a smaller unit would make the teacher more comfortable, and the student more comfortable.
