Thursday, February 10, 2022

Thursday, February 10, 2022

    I slept like a baby last night. My left foot did reasonably well on my morning walk. I got almost 2,000 steps in.  

    I finally canceled my DVD subscription to Netflix. I only recently realized that I was paying for that, and it's taken a while to get around to calling them to end it. The agent told me to return the DVDs I still had. Oh, dear. I hadn't watched a DVD for at least four years. I remember seeing the last ones we ordered at one point, but that was a while ago. He said I would be charged for them if I didn't find them. I went to look for them. I remembered where I had seen them last. Sure enough. They were: The Sapphires, a film about Hitchcock, and Shakespeare Retold I. 

   When I met with adolescent D., he admitted his reading was improving. At the end of the session, with two minutes left, he asked if we could end early. He's never asked for that before. He had worked hard, I said sure. Then he said, "Hold on." I had no idea what he had in mind. Then he said, "Can you see my screen?" Yes. There was his image, although so backlit I couldn't see his face. I know, you're thinking, what's the big deal. That was a huge deal. I had not seen his face in our Zoom meetings yet.  

   From the beginning, he never allowed me to see his face. He put up one of two images. The multiplication table or an image of a Hawaiian beach. Once, his dad walked through the room and asked sarcastically, "Don't you think it would be better if you could see him?" I snapped something back at him. I felt the boy's sense of safety trumped everything. If hiding his face reduced his stress, great. As long as I thought it didn't interfere with his learning, I was good with it. 

   I called his mom immediately after our session. I asked, "Are you sitting down?" She wasn't as impressed when I told her. She didn't get the significance. Some of it is his trust in me. But even better is his increase in his own self-confidence. When we started, this boy wrote hateful messages about himself in school. I didn't know if he would show his face again. I was open to both possibilities. I was hoping he would one day be willing to do this independently. 

    I brought up the subject of his teacher's attitude toward D's presentation, insisting he had memorized it and not read it. His mother said, "He memorized them in the past." Huh? I couldn't imagine he could have memorized a whole speech. It wound up his mom was using memorize to describe an off-the-cuff speech based on an outline. That is not memorization. The following demonstrates memorization. These are the exact words of a poem by Emily Dickenson.

    The thought beneath so slight a film

     Is more distinctly seen,

     As laces just reveal the surge-

    Or mist the Apennine.

                

 Dash showed terrific changes in his executive function when putting his presentation together.

1.         He remembered to do it. (Dash has severe memory problems)

2.         He selected the slides and composed the text on his own. (He probably dictated the text into his phone.)

3.         He read the text to his mom.

4.         He asked his mom to check his text

5.         He did that on Wednesday, 2 days before it was due.

6.         He instructed his mom to bold sections because he knew he had trouble following the text.