Tuesday, April 20, 2021
I woke up angry. It’s hard when you combine a business partnership and a friendship. I’m in that position with someone and am not comfortable with how they conduct themselves. I think they conflate the business and the personal. They have put me in an uncomfortable position. Was I scammed? This is hard.
I finally got together with I’s mother to hear what she had to say about I’s teacher. The teacher is very hard on her. It was she who recommended I. get tutoring. I. is going to an expensive private school with very stringent academic standards. However, her teacher seems to be a bit beyond the pale. The mother knew that the teacher dropped I. by one grade on a paper because she used a capital K instead of a lower case in one word. More seriously, I. had achieved something and been entitled to slime the PE teacher. The teacher read off a list of kids who qualified. I’s name wasn’t on the list; she thought maybe she had made a mistake. Instead, it was the teacher who made the mistake. That same teacher blamed I. for the error. She expected a shy eight-year-old to take on this monster of a teacher. I told the mother that the teacher had not heard I. read aloud since I started working with her. The teacher uses popsicle sticks to determine who gets chosen. However, the teacher has to make an effort to see that all the children get a chance.
I was supposed to have an appointment with Judy to start looking for a gravestone for Mike. We had set it up for 9:30. Then one of my clients changed her appointment to 10:15. I was all set up for the appointment when she called. “Betty, you’re going to be furious with me. I forgot my son was going to be in school today. He has in-school classes on Monday and Tuesday. “What time would be good?” “1pm.” I immediately called Judy to tell her we were back on for the early time. She had changed her plans for a leisurely morning. She hadn’t eaten breakfast yet.
Judy walked over to my house about half an hour later. I wasn’t ready. I packed up the koa wood box with the engraved plaque in the front that once held the utility box that held Mike’s ashes. We were on a hunt to check out a headstone design.
Our first stop was St Michael’s graveyard. I discovered that someone, probably Fr. Lio, had put a cement slab over Mike’s grave, and someone had been buried next to him. There were three graves in a row, all neatly lined up. I had a measuring tape with me; most of the stones we thought might be appropriate were 12” by 24”. I like the design where the gravestone was on a tilt rather than completely perpendicular or completely flat. It’s easy to see, and rainwater will drain quickly.
After checking out the graveyard, we searched for the engraving shop in town Judy knew of. It was time to head back home by the time we found it because I had a 1pm appointment. It was also enough for one day. I can make the trip to the shop on my own. Judy was concerned that it would be hard to realign the design on the plaque because the shape was square, whereas the one on the gravestone is rectangular, 12” by 24”. However, when I took the measurement, it was 3” by 6”, the perfect proportions.
When I got home, I had a one pm appointment with K. He said his day went well at school. He loved recess and lunch. The rest of the day sounded bearable. I continued with the slow drawing of a random line. Watching it changes something in the brain. I asked him how much he liked or disliked the activity on a scale from one to ten. He first said three and changed it to zero. I started asking him a series of questions. His father called out from across the room, instructing him to just tell me he didn’t like it. I asked him to please let me handle the situation. I often have to ask parents to back off. They want their kids to behave one way or another. They are generally in conflict with my objectives.
I asked K where in his body the discomfort showed up. He pointed to the left side of his head. I asked him questions to help him describe the experience. I don’t remember exactly which ones I asked or in what order, but it goes something like this: Does it feel like it’s moving a lot or holding still, like brain lock? What color is that space? How big is it? Is it hard or soft? He said there was a dark blue block pushing down in his head. It was pushing on something red. When someone gives a color, I always ask if it’s a pretty color or an ugly one. K asked, “Is there such a thing as dark red?” There sure is. I had him drain some of it. Interesting. It drained just as it had with my adolescent D, flowing down the eustachian tube. I had one interpretation with D, and another one with K. Of course, the red area with D looked like an infection. The red area with K made me think of anger. We’ll see.
Because K did so well on the second-grade exercises in the Barnell Loft Using Context series, I prepared material on the third-grade level. It’s quite a leap in this case. In the other books in the series, the jump isn’t as great. He struggled with it because he couldn’t decode multi-syllable words. I spent time teaching that. He did have trouble with comprehension. I think he paid more attention to a visualization he created rather than the words on the page. This is a common problem. Children confuse answering what they believe should be correct rather than what the words say. Having their own opinion is essential but knowing what the words are actually saying is also essential.
When I come across this problem, I say, “I am a 12-year-old boy with bright red hair.” Those of you who don’t know me: I am an 80-year-old woman with white hair. However, the question is, “What did I say?” Most kids get it, and I never have to do the exercise again. Some persist, but that‘s because they’d rather guess than reread the passage.
K’s mother said her daughter needs some help with reading. She stumbles on big words and doesn’t read as fluently as she would like her to. This could be a problem for this girl because she has been placed in a higher-level literature class. The mother said her sister would also like me to work with her son, and her husband would like to work with me to improve his reading. I remember that he only taught himself to read 8 years ago.
I had an appointment with A. at 3. His mother helped him set up. I had asked his mom to do some marching activity with him to help him coordinate the two hemispheres of his brain. She said he didn’t have a problem with oppositional movement. He had no issues with crawling. I asked him to demonstrate. Sure enough- he had perfect oppositional movement when he marched. That’s not the problem.
Nonetheless, when he has to do cross-body blending, he sometimes uses his left arm instead of his right. He confuses which letter comes first and which comes second. In a word like pet, if he has to blend the ‘e’ and the ‘t’, he will say that the t comes first, touching his left shoulder, and the e comes second. So much for Brain Gym, One Brain, and Edu-Kinesthetics theories.
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