Monday, July 5, 2021

 Monday, July 5, 2021

 

     I had a terrible night's sleep. I woke up in terror. Someone in my life attributes my disagreement with them to a mental deficit. Unfortunately, that's what my mother did when I was a child. How I survived, I don't know. Now, that trauma has been triggered again. I feel the way I did when I was young- terrible. I am constantly scared and lonely. Mike was a buffer against the world for me. I've lost that; someone delivered one hell of a trigger. This, too, will pass. I remember Mike's words, "It's a problem to be solved."

      When I started my morning walk, the sky was a clear blue, as it has been every morning at six. By nine, the sky was overcast, as it had been of late. It remained that way until late afternoon. This was a joke. It foiled my new solar system. Someone was saying, "Ha! Ha!" 

I had Mama K's kids this morning. I was surprised to see they were still on their camping trip. They were at a great site that Mike and I liked to visit. We didn't camp, but we loved the rugged shoreline there. People swim in an area created by a cement boat ramp where the water is calm.

The first was Twin A., or I thought it was her. The twins' names differ by a single letter, a single sound, and it's a vowel. One's name has a short a, the other a short e. Yikes! So I worked with E thinking she was A. E had looked like she knew the alphabet when I first worked with her. Today it became clear that I had overestimated her. As I covered the letters of the alphabet, A had trouble with several of the letters. It could just as easily have been A.

      I knew I had the wrong one because when A came on, she started spelling her name. I worked on the missing letters with her too. She did better than her sister, who had first appeared ahead of her -back to the drawing board.  

      I had short sessions with all three. With K, I classified every letter in the lowercase alphabet as an uppy, downy or regular. The uppies are the b, l, etc., the downies are the g, p, y, etc. And the regulars are the ones that occupy only one space.

       I had 6th grade D at 9:30. Between the sessions, I did one short walk and cut down the spent heliconia. I had D work with 4th-grade material, moving him up from the third grade. I had him work on making the basic sounds as represented by the letters. He said it created pressure in his head. That's good. It means his brain is doing something different. One the first passage he read, he made mistakes reading saw as was, on as no, a as the, and the as a. After he worked on producing the basic sound units of one sentence, he read a new passage for the first time and read every word correctly. The only problem was his reading sounds jerky and labored. I read the passage for him, leaving long pauses between clauses and phrases. I told him I was collecting the words before I spoke them. When he tried this, he sounded completely different.

      I had him answer the comprehension question in the first passage. He gave the wrong answer. I was confused. When I asked him to explain his answer, he changed it to the correct one. I asked him why he gave the wrong answer first. He said he thought I wanted him to change his answer. Oh, boy. What a laugh!  

       Julia didn't announce my reading help office hours today. I posted the information on the Step Up Tutoring Facebook site. I had a response. Then we had a problem connecting because I hadn't posted a meeting id. A little back and forth, and we connected. John was working with a boy who had trouble with reading fluency. The boy skipped a lot of words. I suggested that he read all the letters in the words in sequence to develop his visual perception. I also suggested that John, the tutor, teach him to chunk phrases and clauses in his mind before he says the words out loud.

      I had adolescent D at 1 pm. He didn't sign on. I called. I suspect he just woke up. I started with the BrainManagementSkills, asking him to check the state of his two hemispheres. His left hemisphere was a blurry white. It was white last time but lacked that detail. His right hemisphere was a weird, bad black. This was a change. In the past, it's been a pretty red or pinkish red. I asked him if he was okay with the black color. He read the sight word sentences, working on paying attention to every letter. He did much better. He got words correct that he had missed before. 

I continued to work on BMS after we did this exercise. I asked about what his brain did to block his memory. I drew a line from the back of his head, moving forward, asking if it never got started or if it got started, and then stopped suddenly. The third choice was that it got started and then rolled over to the right. He chose the third example. Then I asked about the direction of the roll, clockwise or counterclockwise. It moved to the right in a clockwise direction. I explained the spin release to him.  

      My first question was if he wanted to know the theory behind it. I believe the movement inside the cells is spiral. There is the idling speed, the default brain that hums away thinking thoughts about social structure. It spins faster when we get excited or work on something that requires mental energy. However, there are upsetting moments when the spiraling gets stuck in the head, and the brain never returns to the calm default mode. 

       I instructed him on the release, telling him he should find the process interesting. If it became 'freaky' or scary in any way to stop it. I told him I had never seen anyone injured by the process, but if he got scared, it wouldn't work; he would be reluctant to try it again. Since this is the biggest ace I have up my sleeve to help kids with learning disabilities, that would be a drag. I told him not to control the movement but just to observe it. His spiral grew larger and larger. I asked if it was spiraling from in to out or from out to in. His spiral was moving from the outer ring toward the center. This is unusual. I associate that direction with lower intelligence. D does not suffer from that. He was able just to observe and see where it went. I forgot to ask him the speed of movement. For some kids, it speeds up; for others, it slows down. 

      I could feel the spiral filled his head now and was pushing against his skull. He confirmed that image. I told him to let the spiral pass through his skull and move away. He did that. He reported a headache. I did a pull-out. That worked; his headache subsided. We'll see what he's like tomorrow. 

      One good thing, I got him to stop saying, "I don't know," to all questions. I told him whatever his answer was, it was a good one. It gives us both information.