September 1, 2021

 September 1, 2021

 

     As I walked this morning, I worked on using those muscles in my right lower abdomen to push my left hip over and raise my left leg. I'd done this before. It felt different. I have greater mobility. 

     I had sixth grade D at 8:30 am. We continued working on his story.   He has a wealth of information and details. However, something got left out. He told me this was about body surfing. Today, I learned he is talking about boogie boarding. We will have to go back and fill in the details of the waiting phase. Besides, he has his six-year-old brother by his side. Today, he told me the kid didn't swim very well. What?? And his mother lets him go into deep water to surf. They were at a beach where the waves break in relatively shallow water.

   At the end of the class, I left some time to continue identifying the phonemes and the letters that represented them in the third-grade text. 

   I was in contact with the local middle school's head of the special education department because they will be hiring me to work with adolescent D.  Once I'm on payroll, I'll work with him during the school day. That will be great for me. It will leave more time in the afternoon for other students. I don't know how many hours the school is prepared to pay for. I assume it will be one hour. We'll see. I don't know what D's mom thought about keeping the afternoon sessions.  

      When I told Matthew, the special education department head, about my training and experience, he got excited. He was learning an Orton-Gillingham method online. I told him about my approach. He was interested in learning it. I screwed my courage to the sticking point and texted Matthew to ask him if he wanted to learn my method. He jumped at the chance. He would be the first teacher I would be working with. From my experience, special education training mainly teaches how to evaluate the student, complete the proper work, and create IEPs and individual education plans. They get no instruction on how to teach. Teachers have to figure that out themselves. The advantage to being classified for most children is they aren't expected to perform at the same level as the other students. Their workload can be adjusted: it can be at a lower level or just less than their classmates. I am excited to see if Matthew can use my approach to help his students.

   For most of the day, I felt sluggish and somewhat depressed.   But I got several small domestic chores done that I had been putting off. I felt better for doing it. 

   I was supposed to have Mama K's crew at 2. When I called, there were technical problems. The computer was out of juice, and no one could find the power cord. The phone wouldn't do because Mama had just gotten a new phone and hadn't set up Zoom on it yet. Whatever!

   I had adolescent D in the late afternoon. As always, I asked him how school had gone. He said he did some reading. When I asked him how he did, he told me the teacher had given him the key. What! What good does that do? D said he told the teacher he didn't want the key because he wasn't doing the work. Good for him! Had he started to advocate for himself, or was this something he had done before? 

   I asked him about just doing what he could. He said that wouldn't do any good. I pointed out that he got a 0% when he did nothing. He would get a higher score if he did even a little, maybe only 1%, but that would be more than zero. If he did 1% every time, he would learn something and maybe do 2%. He had never thought of that. I told him to figure out every word he could, circle the ones he didn't know, and ask the teacher to tell him those words. Hopefully, I can get him off the all-or-nothing spot he's on. 

    We worked with the eighth-grade material today. We started with Phase I. Then, D initiated reading a passage we had read before. It doesn't sound like much, but it's huge with this kid. He's the master of passivity and does nothing. He's not defiant, just helpless.

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Musings: When are we responsible for someone else's pain?

    I heard the quote, "One man's freedom ends where the other guy's nose begins." My father quoted this to us. The speaker credited John Stuart Mill. I checked it on the internet. Oliver Wendell Holmes is credited with using this image, although his quote doesn't have the same meaning. Abraham Lincoln also used a variation of Mill's quote. From what I'm reading, it was Mills who first referred to the other guy's nose.

   The question is how much responsibility we have for the damage we do to others. Let's say I step on someone's toe while getting on the subway. Do I apologize? I didn't do it deliberately. Do I apologize anyway? While it wasn't the other guy's nose, it was his toe.

    But there is another variable here. How much pain did I cause the person? The degree of pain certainly depends on the other person. If they have a sore toe, the pain could be considerable. I still apologize. However, no one wants to cause that much pain. Well, no one who cares about hurting others.

    But it is excruciating to cause a great deal of pain for another person. I might argue that I'm not responsible for that pain. Question? Would they have felt pain if I hadn't stepped on them? How much responsibility do I have for that pain? Do I not apologize at all? I certainly don't want to think of myself as the cause of a great deal of pain. Do I argue that the person belonging to the toe, saying I was not the cause of their pain because someone else would not have felt it the same way?

   So there are two variables: one, the violating act, and two, the degree of vulnerability of the violated.

     Legally, I think if I punch someone and they die because of an existing brain fault, I am still responsible for their death; they wouldn't have died if I hadn't punched them. I know I wouldn't want to be prosecuted for manslaughter when all I did was punch him. 

     As with all moral dilemmas, it's complicated.