Yvette left for Portland, Oregon on the red-eye last night. I will meet up with her on Sunday night. Mowgli has arranged to take off Monday and Tuesday from work to play with us. Great.
The seminary library director told me two boxes arrived out of the four — a moment of panic. I checked the tracking numbers this morning. The other two are scheduled to arrive on September 23. They mustn't have been on the same boat as the first two.
I've been giving relationship advice. I don't think anyone can judge what is suitable for another person. Years ago, I formulated a theory of complementary neuroses. This would apply to ALL couples. When we have the luxury of choosing our mates ourselves, we choose them not only for things we like but also for things that remind us of unresolved issues with family members, unless we worked it out in therapy already. With any luck, those two people will grow in response to each other. They will serve as each other's muse.
There are a few questions: are there things about this person you like? Can you live with the things about them you don't like without assuming they will change? Will this person respect your point of view and work to make changes for their own sake or yours? It may sound like the last two items contradict each other; they don't. You have to assume that the person will never change, and they are good enough. If there are things that irritate you, it will be your job to get into therapy and change yourself. Making those changes in yourself can produce unexpected changes in your partner. Remember, the only person you can change is yourself.
An interesting development at school: I got a new insight into how the brain works while working with D. He often 'misreads' a word. Today, he was misreading numbers. I can't remember now why he was reading numbers, but he called out the wrong ones on several occasions. I could see it was a struggle for him.
I asked him if the letters and numbers were moving on the page or in his mind. We had worked on that a few times doing spin releases. He said no, that wasn't the problem. Everything on the page was visually stable. I asked if the sounds were spinning in his head. He said no. It was coming straight up from the back of his head. I had him show me. He moved his hand from the center of the back his to the forehead area. I had already done some work with him on his auditory processing. He had shown me that he remembered sounds in the forehead area, which, in my experience, is best suited for visual processing. I reminded him to attend to his head's left side, experiencing the information coming from the left side of the back of his head going to the temple area.
He managed to explain to me that the one that moved up the center of his head got there first. I told him to think of two friends speaking to him simultaneously and choosing which one to pay attention to. I took two pencils, telling him to watch for the one that came up on the left side. I then moved one pencil, through the air over his head down the centerline of his head quickly, and the other pencil slowly by the left side of his head. We did this several times.
This activity reminded me of some work I did a few years ago on visual processing with a student who was having trouble with confusing sequences of letters. I folded a paper into two columns: one column was how the word looked to her; the other column was the correct way. I told her to go home and practice this. There was a vacation in here. When she came back, I asked her if she had done the exercise. She said yes, but then it stopped working. I gave her the exercise to do again. She got every word sequenced correctly. I pulled up the NY Times on my Kindle and gave her words she couldn't possibly be familiar with. After looking at them for a minute, she was able to write down each one correctly. She realized the problem had been resolved. The next day, I asked her if she had shown her mom. She said yes,. Her mom had said, "Holy Cow!"
I realized then that there is more than one part of the brain providing information. For some reason, some people keep both sources active. Because of that, many children learn words incorrectly in the earlier grades. These words continue to be a problem long after they have learned to read much more difficult words.
After this experience with D, I remembered something I heard somewhere (sorry, I have no idea of the source) about the process of translating from one language to another. The researcher said we never actually translate, meaning we don't conjure words in the second language in response to the word in our first. Instead, we recall words in both languages from visual images. The difference is that the response time in our first language is faster. We hear the word in our mind in our language before we hear it in the other one. Therefore, it seems that the trigger for bringing up the word in the second language is the word in the first, but it's not. The word's response time in the second language is longer and overshadowed by our brains' response in the first language.
So what if this is what happens with children who produce the wrong numbers, letters, or words? They have been using the part of the brain that provides the wrong answers. What fires together wires together. That part of the brain has been used more frequently than the 'correct' section of the brain. That would make this problem for some of these readers an attention problem. What part of the brain are you paying attention to?
This is not to say there can't be other problems too. I have worked with children with more complicated issues. While I have found ways to resolve many of those issues, that is not for this space. I hope to cover some of that in my book. Each of these exercises peels off another layer of students that are having problems with word recognition. Nothing works for everyone.
Last night I found two books after an hour of searching. Tonight, I found none. Very frustrating. I have been looking by subject matter. This approach no longer works. I stood before one shelf and said, "Mike, this is too hard. I can't do it." The idea of reorganizing the books on each shelf in alphabet order by author came to mind. The book lists are organized by the author's last name. This would mean that I have to find all the Rs on the shelves to see if I can find a book by Ratzinger. Then I can check to see if it's the right book by Ratzinger. I organized two shelves and found three books. I had looked at the books on those shelves at least a dozen times before.
