Monday, August 2, 2021
I had K's crew for the last time at 8:30. Tomorrow, school starts. I will meet them weekly on Wednesdays during the school year. I started with K. His mom had written the words using the primary lined paper. I had him copy what she had written on the lines below. He was a kick to watch. He focused on the task and then lapsed into conversation with his sisters. Then he would bring himself back to the task on his own, starting where he left off without confusion with excellent concentration. He wrote the whole sentence, but he didn't follow her spacing. He wrote two words on one line where she had written three. Spacing is still a problem for him.
I loved just watching him for two reasons. I love a lot about that living situation. K is one of six kids living in a small space without much money. He has a sense of belonging I long for. It's a crazy situation. It certainly isn't all calm, but his sense of belonging in a safe situation is enviable. The other reason is the way he conducted himself. K has attention problems. He was distracted by his twin sisters talking to him, but he also brought his attention back to the task -on his own. Amazing! I called his mom while he worked to share with her what I saw. It made my day.
With Twin A, I only checked two of the letters we have already worked on, q and g. She aced them. Today she said the letters in -at in the correct order, from left to right, without prompting. She wrote the words in a notebook. It was her idea, not mine. She was good with blending -at family words with continuant beginning single letter consonants until she hit nat. Then she converted it to nap. I did an auditory discrimination task with her on nap versus nat. She could easily tell the difference even though I covered my mouth, denying her that clue. She can't hold the difference when she says it. She said, "They sound alike." They sure do. (It just occurred to me to remind her that they don't feel alike.) They are both stops. I don't think she would confuse them if they were the first sound in the word. In the final position, they are more difficult to discern. However, there is a huge difference in meaning between nap and nat, or map and mat.
Then I had Twin E. Yesterday, she remembered the word the right off the bat, today-nothing. I worked on that retrieval. Yes, she could 'see' the word written on her pink blanket. She didn't hear speech sounds in the part of her brain I associate with the auditory working memory. I redirected her to that part of the brain. Still, nothing came up. I asked her if the response got stuck. She said it wasn't at the back of the brain. She directed me to a spot further to the front of the brain, where the response got stuck.
Last night I listened to a lecture on the P3 wave, the neurological impulse in response to seeing a word, and also learned about the N wave. The information on the P3 wave contradicts what I have been thinking. I draw the path for the impulse from the back of the left side of the head directly to the front in a straight line. I drew what I understood to be the P3 wave, moving from the back of the brain upward and over the top to the front of the brain. She didn't respond to that. It occurred to me to draw the line going down and then swinging up to the front. She could allow the impulse to move down; that is compatible with how her brain works from what she has said before. Something came up now, but it was the word that instead of the. I don't fully understand what I learned, but I did get that the directional flow of the impulse was different than I thought it was. Okay, back to the drawing board.
I had my reading support office hour today for the tutors of the Step Up Tutoring program. I only had one participant today. I sometimes have two, but no more. I always start asking for information about their student's problems. They often have some pat explanation like they don't pay attention or don't read enough independently. From my perspective, they usually don't know enough to give me detailed information. I have to pull it out of them. That was the case today. I would offer suggestions, and P. would complain about the student's unwillingness to practice independently. His student came from a non-English speaking home with no books and didn't have access to a library. I would suggest how to help him with a problem, and he would keep talking about the lack of practice problem. Teachers often fall back on that old cry. I said, if you're playing cards, need an ace but don't have it in your hand, you have to work with what you have instead of saying, "I need an ace, I need an ace." I finally got through to him when I compared practicing reading with practicing a sports activity. "Did you ever coach a sport?" Yes. "Did you see people do things incorrectly?" Yes. "Practice doesn't create improvement if you are practicing the skill incorrectly. The first thing you have to do is see how the person is executing the skill. Then you can say 'practice.'" He got it. ng
He had told me that the student read accurately but slowly. I told him to check that the student was using the automatic pathway for reading and teach his student to use it if he wasn't.
The student's second problem was comprehension. I teach careful sentence analysis as a way of addressing the problem. He listened to my sentence analysis description and talked about how he showed his student how to create a timeline. Creating a timeline is valuable, but it was not what I was talking about. Many of our students don't know how to make sense of an unfamiliar sentence in any language. Students from educated homes with parents who talk about their experiences, thoughts, and feelings hear unfamiliar sentences and learn to figure out what they mean. Language isn't used that way in all cultures. Languages can play a minimal role. It is used to issue commands or requests or reaffirm commonality, "Hey, man!" It is not used to think through a problem that doesn't have an obvious solution. That language is formulaic, as in "Hey, man, "or scripted as in, "Hi, how you doing?/ Good. How's by you?/All's good," or some more conventional traditional version of that script. It is scripted; the speaker is not an author of language; the speaker is merely an actor. School requires us to become authors. That's a huge cultural jump.
Secondly, the written language is "another language." I once heard a teacher in Princeton, New Jersey, a hotbed of the overeducated, complain that the way her students wrote, you would think English was a foreign language. Again, it is; well, it is another register (the linguistic term for the different ways we used language within the same language.
I just looked up the registers of English. They are different than the ones I learned. They listed "high formal, formal, neutral, informal, and vulgar." I suspect vulgar means 'street languages' or colloquial, not crude. The ones I learned had to do with standard versus nonstandard versions of the language, also contrasting the written form and the spoken.
It is an interesting change reflecting the broadening acceptance of local and social varieties. Also, this list does not distinguish between the written and the spoken form I once learned. My speech is close to high-formal. I think I can run the full range from high-formal to vulgar, with a greater than average leaning to the high formal. I write the way I speak, or is it that I speak the way I write? At any rate, don't assume that your students understand how a sentence works just because they can hold a perfect conversation in English.
Here's an analogy. Lego makes kits. You sit down with a child and explain the difference between the farm and garage kits. You set them loose to play. The child does nothing. You discover they had no idea how to link the pieces together. Message: check if your student knows the basics first.
I hear someone saying, "Anyone can figure that out for themselves." Of course, you're right, anyone can, and many, many children do. But those who have been trained never to try things on their own, never to experiment, they can't. If the student has been inhibited from using trial and error, they don't have the tools to learn. Children have different experiences. Some don't try at all; some are doing it too much and won't "Just follow my directions."
Careful analysis of each sentence is a fast way of bringing conscious attention to language structure. Just reading to kids is good but guarantees less. If the student has a habit of just listening for specific information to get a surface understanding of the content, they won't improve. My method for analyzing is to ask questions about each sentence so every clause, every phrase, and sometimes, every word can answer a question. I once formulated one hundred questions using a sentence from an SAT excerpt. After you've asked all those questions about sentence number one, you do the same with sentence number two. Next, you ask questions about the relationship between sentence number two to sentence number one. I can hear you say; this would take forever. You only have to do this with one or two passages a day or maybe only do it once.
I worked in a community with a large Somali population. A high school junior approached me, saying he needed help with comprehension. To begin with, he had an interesting observation. He said he spoke Somali better than he did English. Then he paused, looking puzzled, and said, "No. I can't say most of the things I say in English in Somali." His mother tongue wasn't used for that purpose in his home. Note: It is used for that purpose in Somali Universities. I told him to practice this questioning approach. He said it would take him forever. I told him to just practice one or two sentences a day. After a while, his unconscious mind would take over the process. At the end of the year, he came to me and said, "Thank you."
Asking questions at an unconscious level is what we do when we read. It all happens below our conscious awareness. It has nothing to do with intelligence.
I had sixth grade D at 10:30. I had to call; his mom had forgotten. I addressed his hatred of the work we were doing. His mom said he hates to read. I can't think of anyone who loves to do something they can't do well, particularly when doing it well is considered socially important. I had to handle him with care. Yes, he hated the class. At a rate from 1 to 10, how much? A 6 out of 10. I didn't know where to start. I knew things I could do, but I preferred to wait until something felt right before proceeding.
Using tapping came first, with this setup sentence, "Even though I have trouble reading, I love and comfort myself." That didn't do much. I suggested, "I forgive myself." I tried the tapping method with the "I forgive myself" setup. It didn't go far. He had already admitted to being angry at himself for his limitation. I pointed out that while there may be some value in being angry at ourselves, it often works against us. I lead him through the complementary releases. "I let go of anything bad about my hatred for my anger and keep anything positive or anything I still need." And then its complement, "I release anything bad about my love for my anger and keep anything positive about my love for my anger or anything I still need." All this released some of his stress. At the end of the session, I got fear. I asked him if he was scared because he couldn't read. Absolutely not! Several hours after the session, I realized that that was it; he hates the fear he feels.
Then I thought I would work with him next time. I would explain the automatic response of fear when we cannot perform as our peers can. It is a foundational primitive response. It was there for our survival when we were wandering the savanna. It's not as functional in today's world.
Question: Would D accept my explanation and allow himself to do the exercise to release the fear even if he doesn't acknowledge it?
The brush fire was still raging this morning, but it was sufficiently under control that the evacuation orders weren't reinstated. Judy said her son had gone to a golf course further north but south of the fire. He had to come home. Ash was falling. They were inhaling it-not a good golf day. I texted Sandor to see how he was doing. His home is further north. He said they left their window open when they left, and the inside of the house and the yard were covered with ash. I told them the ash would make good fertilizer for the plants. Everything has a silver lining.
No comments:
Post a Comment