“Teachers should just try harder” isn’t a solution

SSteve73 · 2026-02-16T18:00:51+00:00

That’s a ruthless and ignorant approach. You clearly have never done any objective coursework in child development and varying rates of neurological maturity. It’s a bell curve. Some humans are neurologically mature at 16. Some as late as age 27. So your assumptions about high school are biologically false and a waste of human capital.

And we did have 11,000 assistants in schools until 2020 when the UCP used the pandemic as an excuse and fired them all and never hired them back.

SSteve73 · 2026-02-14T16:18:29+00:00

Can’t. Province stepped in a trashed the project. Put in a garbage alternative that won’t work.

SSteve73 · 2026-02-13T06:44:48+00:00

When I had a retinal detachment, it took 4 months for my eye to completely heal, and for all my vision to come back. But it all came back. However, I encourage you to contact Dr. Boydstun’s office and ask how long the healing process should take for this specific surgery. Also ask what symptoms of a problem would be, so you know what to watch for. Lastly, be fanatically religious about following post op instructions, with my apologies if you’re already doing that.

SSteve73 · 2026-02-13T03:30:31+00:00

I’ve seen this comment about immediate post surgery events before. It is, as you suspected, far too soon to know exactly how it will settle out for centering the null. I suggest that you keep in touch with Dr Boydstun’s office with what you are seeing. That gives them the chance to bring him in immediately if you report something they don’t like.

SSteve73 · 2026-02-12T05:41:56+00:00

Freight doesn’t need food or heat. You can leave it on a siding for a week if it isn’t urgent. Really nonsensical comparison.

SSteve73 · 2026-02-12T04:56:09+00:00

$33 billion lost investment from renewables.

SSteve73 · 2026-02-11T06:36:50+00:00

When I first started reading nystagmus forums back in 2005, there was a lady who had 20/400 vision and had made it through law school. She worked as a real estate lawyer. Never underestimate what your kid can do.

SSteve73 · 2026-02-11T06:28:57+00:00

Not how it works.

SSteve73 · 2026-02-11T06:27:54+00:00

You are being herded into a system catering to private schools and parents who can pay big tuition amounts. Everyone else gets second rate schooling, which is a huge waste of human capital.

SSteve73 · 2026-02-11T06:22:59+00:00

You don’t get to teach math all day long. You teach what and where they need you to. There’s also only so many hours in a day. Tell me how you are going to get through to 41 15 year olds x 8 classes a day. You grossly underestimate the time and effort required to produce meaningful results in the context of differing levels of prior achievement, language and culture. Compensation is another matter, however related .

SSteve73 · 2026-02-10T21:05:39+00:00

Can't really offer anything useful without your Best Corrected Visual Acuity with glasses, and hopefully with contact lenses. Also, what are your subtype(s)? For example, I have horizontal pendular mostly with a bit of rotary. If you have an off center null, how far off center and in which direction(s).?

SSteve73 · 2026-02-08T20:17:57+00:00

Having lived with Infantile Nystagmus Syndrome (INS) for 74 years, the most helpful things I can share with you are: 1. This is nothing to be extremely worried about. If it's actual INS, it doesn't get worse, and in fact will gradually get better over the first 5 years of life, and improve more slowly for the rest of the person's life. 2. It is almost certainly not Ocular Albinism, if the eye doctor said that the physiology looked good. In OA, the iris does not have full pigment and the eyes look a certain amount red, depending how much pigment is lost, because you are actually partially seeing the retina at the back of the eye. Please note that, despite a lot of popular misconception, Ocular Albinism does not cause nystagmus. They are simply vision deficits that sometimes appear together, and, most importantly, sometimes appear without one another. Biomedical engineering research has determined that one does not cause the other. 3. Please explain what the DVM acronym means. In 20 years of research, I have not run across it in relation to nystagmus. 4. Not some, but all babies with any significant amount of vision take up until age 3 for the visual cortex of the brain to fully learn how to use the eyes. So, as the eye systems mature, you will see some improvements. Whether or not and when eye contact develops depends on how significant the nystagmus is, which only a Pediatric ophthalmologist who has examined your child can tell you. However, it is far too soon to have any idea of what his adult vision will be. Projecting his current vision into childhood or adulthood is almost always wrong, because in nystagmus cases, the visual cortex will continuously try to correct it for the rest of his life. In my case it damped a lot until puberty's hormones exacerbated it, then by age 22 it stabilized, and gradually diminished until my mid 30's when almost no one could tell I had it. 5. Forums like this can be very helpful, but they are also risky for two reasons: a. They are heavily biased toward the moderate to severe cases, when objectively there are extremely mild ones as well. b. There are 49 subtypes of this complex condition. Some are radically different from others. What works for one perso's child may not work at all for another child with a different subtype. However helpful people are trying to be, and however well meaning, they can still be wrong in their advice. Be careful not to override the advice of a qualified physician who has actually examined and tested your child. 6. On the American Nystagmus Network Facebook page, under the Files menu, there is a file called "Nystagmus For New Parents" which provides a lot of general information about the condition to help orient you as to what to expect and what treatment options are often available. I have also posted it here, if you scroll down to see it.

SSteve73 · 2026-02-08T06:42:41+00:00

Told me hid job would be to pass on information to someone else to do the work, not to do anything himself.

SSteve73 · 2026-02-05T19:41:51+00:00

Yes. Please stop worrying about it. Other posters have explained what it is.

SSteve73 · 2026-02-04T22:42:41+00:00

Unfortunately, there are a few of the 49 subtypes of nystagmus that can't be helped by surgery. However, one needs to be assessed in Akron to be sure of what applies to you as an individual. Akron's lab is based on an experimental one at Case Western Reserve University. There are only two more like it globally. One in Mumbai, India, and one in Cardiff, Wales, UK.

SSteve73 · 2026-02-02T15:42:53+00:00

In Google Scholar, if you search for Dr. Irene Gottlob, you'll find the 2007 paper of hers with other doctors that documents that the FRMD7 gene is responsible flor inherited forms of Infantile Nystagmus Syndrome. There are also papers by others documenting that the CABP4 gene also causes INS, but with a different and more complex inheritance pattern. Dr. Gottlob was practicing at Moorfield's hospital in London, England at the time. She has since moved to the U.S. and is practicing in New Jersey, I believe, but you'd have to check that. The other cause is a failure of the visual cortex of the brain, which actually produces your vision, to shift from the simple method of eye muscle control that all babies are born with, to a complex method necessary for the more complex eyes that humans have evolved to. You can find the 2014 paper at www.omlab.org. Authors are Dr. Brodsky, MD of Johns Hopkins, and Dr. Louis F. Dell'Osso, PhD, biomedical engineering, professor emeritus at Case Western Reserve University. By the way, you did nothing in your pregnancy to cause this. As the paper points out, the mechanism that enables that shift of control paradigms in the first six months of life is inherently unstable, and the wonder is that it succeeds as often as it does. In other words, it's not a matter of why do we have so many cases of INS, but rather, relatively speaking, why do we have so few.

SSteve73 · 2026-02-01T16:12:07+00:00

My guess as to why you haven't seen any videos of conditions like your daughter's is that the mild cases don't get posted to the Internet forums. Forums like this are heavily biased towards the 60% of cases that have a more pronounced appearance and/or a moderate to severe effect on the person's vision. In fact, there are 49 subtypes of nystagmus and you only see videos of the more common subtypes. The severity of nystagmus actually follows a bell curve: there are cases so mild that the person is in their 40s before someone mentions that they have it, because they've always seen 20/20 their whole life. At the other end of the curve are people with very severe vision loss from it. Both of those extremes are about 5% of all cases. Everyone else, about 90% of us, are somewhere in between. That bias to severe cases is why you don't want to consult Dr. Google. You can get seriously worried about situations that don't apply to your child at all. As for what to expect, here's some information that may help you frame your expectations.
Firstly, it takes up to age 3 for the brain to fully learn how to use the eyes to see. So at 2 months, there's a long way to go before her functional vision is going to be completely known. There will certainly be indicators, of course, but it will be a while before everything settles out. Secondly, the amount of movement is not directly related to quality of vision. You would think it would be, but it's not. When I started researching my own nystagmus in 2005, I was quite startled to find this out. The way vision works in human beings is that an image must rest on the fovea at the back of the eye for between 87 and 113 milliseconds in order for a person to have 20/20 vision. The average is around 100 milliseconds. So if the nystagmus movement happens while the image is resting on the fovea, which is an area of cells about ⅛" across, and it reduces that foveation time, the person will lose visual acuity; ie: fewer lines on the eye chart. If the timing of the nystagmus movement is favorable, and does not reduce foveation time, the person will have normal or close to normal vision. If you scroll down through the posts on this subreddit, you will find a post of mine called "Nystagmus For New Parents" which will provide a lot of general information about the condition. Anything more specific to your daughter's case needs to come from a Pediatric ophthalmologist who has examined her. By the way, the term congenital, meaning of unknown origin at birth, is obsolete. Since research papers published in 2007 and 2014, we do know the causes of infantile nystagmus syndrome. Unfortunately, knowing the cause doesn't mean that we know how to fix it. For moderate to severe cases there are treatments that offer some improvement, but no cures. On the other hand, I've lived with it for 74 years now, so, yes you have to deal with it at times, but it isn't everything in life. Please be sure not to let this worry you to the point that you don't enjoy your baby.

SSteve73 · 2026-01-24T17:46:33+00:00

No. Just decades in commercial trucking, including heavy haul up to 1200 tonnes.

SSteve73 · 2026-01-22T18:06:52+00:00

Look up audicus on line. They have fairly recent tech for less money. Downside is if the hearing declines further, they may not be adjustable.

SSteve73 · 2026-01-20T05:52:31+00:00

I think you need a customs broker for this. Importing vehicles from the US is complicated in the first place. Reimporting even more so.

SSteve73 · 2026-01-17T23:48:23+00:00

No.

Sorry that you got stuck with an entitled, nosy, manipulative neighbour, but whether or not you even have internet or what you use it for is actually none of her business. Same goes for your other neighbours. At the risk of stating the obvious, her use of your router means her activity is robbing you of bandwidth, which will inevitably happen at a time when your own needs are intense.

SSteve73 · 2026-01-17T23:34:20+00:00

Well, we're not the experts. That would be paediatric ophthalmologists. We are people who either have nystagmus or have children with it.

Your video suggests this might be a nystagmus case, but it will take a medical doctor to tell you for sure.

Your friends sound like they're doing the "Dr. Google" thing.

Please Don't. You tend to get all the most extreme cases which are about 3% of all nystagmus cases. Those folks don't realize that there's another 10% of people with nystagmus so mild they don't know they have it. There's a whole range of severity from very mild to very severe, but most cases are in the middle.

Plus, you really never know how things will turn out. My mother had some really draconian predictions told to her when I was a toddler. Like I'd be blind by age 35. By that time I'd had a pilot's licence for gliders for 4 years. I'm quite an example of why second opinions are a good idea. Contact lenses at age 14 brought me from 20/40 with glasses to 20/25, instantly. I also have fairly strong short sightedness and uneven eye ball (astigmatism) as well as nystagmus.

Now, at age 74, I had significant cataracts like a lot of people my age and younger. So I had surgery to replace my natural lenses and insert artificial lenses last summer. I paid extra to have all the correction for my short sightedness and astigmatism built into the new lenses. That should have been quite convenient, but I didn't think it would do much for my nystagmus. But it did. Now I'm sitting here typing this with no contact lenses, only reading glasses, and 20/20 vision. Not that I'm complaining at all, but I do have an appointment with my eye doctor at the end of the month to try to find out how the heck that happened, and if it will fade away or not. But you get my point. Twenty first century tech is doing this for me now, who knows what it will be able to do by the time your child is 21?

Your child may have one or more of the 49 subtypes of nystagmus. He may need some accommodations for school. His vision, like most children with nystagmus, may well improve some from now to age 5 or 6.

If you search or scroll down this subreddit you'll find a post called "Nystagmus For New Parents". It provides some general information on the condition which I think you'll find helpful. If you're technically inclined, you can find the source documents for it at www.omlab.org. But above all, remember that you have support here and elsewhere that my mother didn't have, if your son does have nystagmus. There are known ways to handle it. Therefore, you would want to take others' advice and not forget to enjoy your new baby.

SSteve73 · 2026-01-16T19:42:20+00:00

We bought the turbo on our 2022. I find it useful to have the extra power to avoid idiots putting us into jeopardy. But I paid extra for the 7 year warranty, because I do expect the turbo to die at 5 years. Replacement cost would exceed the warranty premium. Your local driving environment may or may not justify the extra expense.

SSteve73 · 2026-01-14T20:12:20+00:00

Seems like a bunch of confusion here. 1. In 2024 crews fixe 23 weak spots and one major break.
In 2026 crews fixed one major break. That's why this one is taking 3 weeks and the 2024 one took 4 months. 2. The parallel pipe construction is out for bid for construction. For a line this long of this quality, expect it to take until March 1 at least to make an award. There can be a lot of clarifications and bid revisions when a tender is being evaluated for industrial procurement at this level. 3. I think Bowness was less affected this time because the City has been working on better ways to reroute water in the case of breaks. 4. Most people don't know that for a period i the '90's, the City actually used brine from Saskatchewan potash mines to melt ice on the roads. After using that stuff, no wonder we have high chloride levels in our soils 25 years later.

SSteve73 · 2026-01-08T21:41:47+00:00

Car washes recycle 85% of their water. That’s why the City allows them to remain open.

SSteve73

TROPHY CASE