Thursday, March 31, 2022

 Thursday, March 31, 2022

 

     I had a bad night’s sleep. It was the third anniversary of Mike’s funeral and the third birthday of my grandnephew. My niece watched Mike’s funeral on Facebook while in labor. I have been enjoying pictures of him as he grew. I was in some group thingie, along with other family members. Today his paternal grandfather shot a video as Sam received his birthday presents. There was his modified bed. He no longer sleeps in a crib. There was a two-wheel bike and a bouquet of balloons. He was three. What do you think he liked the best? He loved the balloons. I also learned today that my niece would give birth to their second child in May. Very exciting.

   Because I had a bad night, I stayed in bed. Then I heard Yvette at the side door, “Betty, can I move your car?” OMG! It was Thursday, driveway yoga day. I completely forgot about it. I ran to the door in an undressed state to unlock it so Yvette could get in and get the car key. I raced to get dressed and join the class. I also had to get Elsa’s food together. She would have to make do with the yard to relieve herself. 

  Yoga was wonderful, as usual. We had a new student today, Nancy, from Yvette’s Island Heart Care class. She’s close to my age. She lives ten minutes away and may become a regular student. 

  I heard about the results of Mama K’s kids after she met with the school special ed team. Both girls were still reading at a Kindergarten level but had seen substantial improvement. It had been a while since I worked with the girls on reading. They didn’t have a computer they could use. Reading text on the phone didn’t sound like a good idea. Our recent work has been story writing to help them improve their verbal expression and comprehension skills. There was nothing said about improvement in those areas.

    I had a session with adolescent D this afternoon. I started by asking how he was because I had been hard on him in our last session. He said, ‘Okay,” but I could hear from his voice that it had had an impact. He needs to be more engaged with his learning when I’m not around. His passivity was frustrating for me and self-defeating for him. We talked about his self-hatred because of his disability. When I asked him to say something positive, he said, “I’m amazing.” He is in many ways, but none of that solves his reading problems. He still had that problem. Knowing about his bullying, I asked him. “Do your parents know about your reading problems?” Of course. “Do they love you anyway?” Yes. “While your friends may not know the full extent of your reading problems, they know you have trouble. Do they like you anyway?” Yes. “That’s the way you should feel about yourself. If there was anyone ever in your life who put you down as a person because of your reading problems, it was their problem. Don’t use their behavior as a model for how you should treat yourself.” I also told him, “It is almost impossible for a human being not to respond when someone tells us we’re terrible.” 

    I told him the following story: A few years ago, when volunteering at the local public school in the third grade, I said the right words to convert a school bully to ‘one of the nicest people.’ Bullying was a family pattern. She had a large extended family. One of her cousins was in her class. This cousin bullied people too. She was furious at me for converting her best buddy from a bully to a nice person. When she was in fifth grade, I passed her on campus. She sneered and stuck her nose as she passed me. Her contempt was clear. No, I didn’t take the contempt of a ten-year-old to heart, but I did feel that small response inside me. We are designed to be sensitive to contempt regardless of whom it comes from. While as a seventy-year-old adult, I had no trouble dismissing that twinge. No child has those resources. Children have to learn to forgive themselves for taking that contempt to heart. It’s not their fault. 

   I asked him if what I said had meaning. He gave a whole-hearted yes, the likes of which I had not heard from him before. He sounded less defended. 

   We then started to work on the Driver’s manual. He remembered most of the words but got stuck on the -ting in operating and the -tion in condition. He confused the two. I drilled him on just -tion and -ting. He could not remember the pronunciation of -tion when I wrote the second one under the first. He had to start from scratch. Wow! This poor kid. We have to find a way to fix this problem.

  I proposed using a drilling strategy and then stopping. D thought I meant stopping altogether and sounded alarmed. I assured him I wouldn’t give up on him, but I sometimes feel like it. I feel like giving up on many things these days. I find I have less patience, or maybe I’m not designed for these long-term commitments with students with serious problems that are not quickly resolved. I feel like one of those rescue dogs that needed to find a live victim occasionally to keep going. I need someone who needs just a little fix to get them over a hump to give me a boost. In the case of dogs, someone will ‘plant’ such a victim to prevent them from getting depressed. 

   Is there such a thing as an easy fix? You better believe it. When I was tutoring at the school, I would sometimes have time and say, “Is there anyone in the class who would like to work with me” Hands shot up. One girl said, “I need help reading longer words.” I showed her my six-step decoding process for multi-syllable words. She came back two days later and said thank you. I can think of several others. Some to do with comprehension, some with copying skills, and some with writing skills. Yeah, these kids needed the smallest boost. There was an improvement with one or two short sessions. Their success felt great.