Monday, January 2, 2023

Monday, January 2, 2023 

   

   I slept through most of the night. I woke up before my 5:30 alarm went off, did some in-bed exercises, and got out of bed at 7:30. I assumed I dozed off. Elsa and I did a shorter-than-usual morning walk. I didn’t want her to wait so long to be fed; it was already late for her.

   I did the morning work of editing and posting last year’s entry in the public blog. While working on it, M & W’s father called. Yesterday, he asked if we could skip today. Now, he asked if we could do it today. He thought her school started tomorrow. The Hawaii Public School System’s teachers start tomorrow; the students begin on Wednesday. We schedule M for 10 am.

    He asked if I was planning to see sixth-grade W. I thought she was doing fine. I was surprised she had a B+ in English on her report card when she had As in every other subject. I asked him about it. He said she had been getting Cs most of the semester. I asked her if she needed help with anything. She never did. I told him to tell me if he sees she needs help so I can get in there and take care of it.

   I had a 9 am appointment with Mama K’s crew. I started with third-grade Twin E. She is behind Twin A in her reading development. When I started with them, it was the other way around. I anticipated E would move ahead, leaving A in the dust. No one is moving ahead so rapidly to leave anyone in the dust.

    I have been emphasizing automatic recall with E. I started using a passage from my updates. Neither girl could read what I wrote. I was sharing nothing of myself with them. The other day, I couldn’t find something in a timely way and used passages from Barnell Loft’s sixth-grade text to do a sight-word search. I was surprised to discover a wider selection of sight words embedded there. I started with the same passage I had last time. E labored through it even though she was faster than when we started.

   Getting Twin E to understand that we use two systems for reading so she would learn to use the one she was weak in was difficult. Both girls are taking surfing lessons. I used that as an analogy. You use one set of skills to paddle out to the wave and another set to ride it in. You don’t use the paddling skills when you are riding the wave, and you don’t use the riding skills when you’re paddling out to the wave. You get the point. Automatic recall and decoding skills have to be separately learned and practiced. The overuse or misuse of one versus the other causes many problems in reading.

    My next ‘victim’ was third-grade Twin A. I used the same material with her as I had with E. I just started doing this with her in our last session. She zoomed through using automatic recall. She went through faster than Twin E and recalled more words. I then had her reread the primer passage from the testing materials. She read two paragraphs of that with reasonably good speed. She recalled words she had seen from our last reading. She recalled words she saw in the first sentence when she encountered them later in the passage. Yes, that’s a significant accomplishment for her. She sometimes guessed a word with zero relationship to the letters in the word using context clues. I wondered how much of that adaptation she had made to compensate for her poor reading skills and how much because a teacher, following the Reading Recovery method, taught her to do that. I did some decoding with her.

     She drew a blank when I asked her to identify the vowel in the word. When I asked her to name the vowel letters, she started with the letter O.  I told her to name them in order. She had no difficulty. Interesting. Why did she choose not to use that skill if she had it? After I wrote the vowel letters she had dictated, she had no trouble identifying the vowel letter in the word. I had to give her the keyword for that vowel sound. Then, she blended the sounds smoothly. When it came to words with consonant blends, she often dropped one as she combined them with a new sound. Those consonant blends. I understand why teachers want to teach them as single sounds. Teaching them that way works for some kids and causes problems for others.

   I had fourth-grade K last.   I spoke to his older brother the other day. He told me he would argue with you if you said anything to K that contradicted his thoughts. He is not open to learning anything new. I hadn’t thought about him in those terms. I wasn’t sure why he had so much trouble learning something new. I see him as a bright child. From the conversation, I thought it might be a problem with discomfort with confusion.

   Every time we hear or see something we have never heard or seen, our brains search for the familiar to help make sense of it. Our heads spin. They continue spinning if we don’t find a familiar association. If we can’t, we can have one of two reactions. We can respond with anticipation, “I’m going to learn something new!!”  or with confusion, “Something is wrong with me or the situation!” Anticipation feels good; confusion feels bad. We do whatever we can to avoid the nasty feeling. From what K’s brother told me, K responds with confusion and blocks all incoming information.

    My first question to K was, “Does your head spin when you hear something you never heard before?” His answer was clear, “No!” Interesting. I would be surprised if that weren’t his reaction. I considered that he was so defended that he could block that feeling immediately.

    I opened up the whiteboard on Zoom. I wrote a K on one side and a B for my name on the other. “ When I teach you something, I have to reach out to you,” and drew an arrow from the B to the K. “When you don’t understand what I taught, I try to figure out why you might be confused and try again,” and drew a longer arrow. I did that two more times. Then I said, “While you will do what I tell you to do, you don’t try to understand what I’m saying.” No arrows are coming from you to me. He agreed with that.

    At the end of the session, he agreed that he didn’t mentally reach out and try to understand what the other person was saying. I should say here I do not think K is cognitively challenged. I think he is a bright child. Even very bright people can be closed-minded; he is quite literally closed-minded and makes no effort to understand what someone is saying. He conceded that he didn’t like this in himself. I always ask if someone wants to change. Children often understand that question to include, “If you do, then why don’t you?” But that is not what I am saying. I know he doesn’t have a clue how to change. I’m not sure I have a clue how to help him change. But I know that change is impossible if he isn’t on board.

    At 10 am, I had second-grade M.  I hadn’t met with her since Friday. She was going back to school on Wednesday. I reviewed the material we covered. She was good with counting by 10s and 100s, identifying the odd and even numbers, and expanded notation. Then, I reviewed addition and subtraction with regrouping. She was right back to square one. Given a two-digit problem, she drew a vertical line between the 10s and 1s columns. Then, she started adding the tens column before the ones. That works well when doing math in your head but not when working on paper. She was confused about which way to regroup in the addition problem. She didn’t have the concept.

   While fully engaged when tutoring, I had little energy for anything else, including talking to friends. I took a deep two-hour nap after completing a short walk to get my numbers up. I am somewhat concerned about my tiredness and my need for sleep. However, if I am finally processing the grief over my father’s death, that would explain a lot. This is the first time in sixty-seven years that I miss him.  

    I had a session with Adolescent D in the afternoon. D has serious auditory processing problems. In our last session, I asked him if he could remember something his mother asked him to do without repeating it to himself out loud. No. Could he remember the lyrics to a song? Yes. But when I explored it today, he only remembered the repeated phrases. He didn’t know all the words from any song- back to the drawing board.

     I asked him where in his brain he remembered the words. He said right under the fontanel. From my observation, the best spot for recalling words is a little deeper in the brain. I showed him how to locate that spot. I took two pens; I placed the point of one in the area of the fontanel and the other at the temple. The best spot is where these two pens would meet if I pushed them into my head. I asked him if he could picture a candle burning at that spot. He could. I asked him to hear my voice in his head. He could. He said it felt weird. That’s good. It means it is something other than what he usually does. I asked him to recall something I had said. He could do that. When I asked him to recall the same words a bit later, he couldn’t. I asked him how he felt about my pushing to solve the problem of his auditory processing. He said he felt good about it. I believe in the mind’s plasticity, especially in a young person. It’s worth a try.

   We switched to another activity. D chose reading. I asked him to say and write each letter in each word before he read the first sentence. He then read the words. I heard a difference.  

   Then I recalled the other day, he said he didn’t follow the decoding procedures I asked him to follow because it felt terrible. Doing it was a reminder that he had a problem with reading.

   I did an EFT tapping series: "Even though I can’t read well, I love and comfort myself. Then, “I love and forgive myself.” None of it had meaning for him or produced greater relaxation. But I felt a difference. I could feel the knot in his stomach. He confirmed my observation. Yes, he hated that feeling in the pit of his stomach. I led him through a release, “I release anything negative about my hatred for this feeling and keep anything positive or anything I still need.” This produced a big change. He felt greater relaxation.

   I went for another brief walk to get my step count up to 6,000 and then sat down to work on this update. I have so little time to get things done these days. Sleeping takes up most of my time. I hope this isn’t forever.