Thursday, November 17, 2022

 Thursday, November 17, 2022

   Yvette texted me last night that she was fried after work and wouldn’t lead a driveway yoga class in the morning. I slept in, getting up close to 7. I went to bed before ten. I had another good night’s sleep.  

   I didn’t fret too much about the situation with adolescent K. It was out of my hands now. My only concern is that I would be accused of something. If I were to quit, I felt I couldn’t tell people at the school why I decided not to work with him. I wouldn’t want to put him in jeopardy. They wouldn’t recommend other kids if I said I was too busy. 

  When I posted the blog this morning, I read that adolescent D said he hadn’t read in school even though he copied a passage. I didn’t know that was possible. The boy made no effort to read. The other day, his mother said he picked up a magazine while she was driving and read an article to her. Wow! If I do say so myself.

  D and I had a ten-minute session today. We worked on the word pursue with Phase I. I gave him the phonemes within each syllable. He had to blend those sounds, then the syllables, and figure out the word. We started this exercise with one-syllable words with just two phonemes. That was a challenge. He reversed the sounds so to came out as ot. He had made a great deal of progress. Now, we were working on two-syllable words. More importantly, he had to blend sounds regardless of meaning. The individual syllables are often nonsense when they stand alone. Being content-dependent, this was a challenge for him.

  Today, he faced a different challenge. He had to produce the syllables pur and sue independently and blend them to get the word pursue. He could say each syllable separately, but when he had to blend them, he came out with ser and pue, reversing the two initial sounds. As I had many times before, I asked him if the sounds moved around in his head. Was there spinning in his head? He finally said yes. I didn’t know if he always knew this was the problem or had only found the words to identify this experience because I have asked him about it repeatedly. 

  D could tell me that he made an effort to stop the spinning. I explained the theory behind the spinning. Movement always happens in our brain as the neurons connect and process information from current experience, memory, or imagination. Our brains hum away like idling cars. The spin increases when something new, disturbing, or exciting enters our minds. When we are exposed to unfamiliar information, the spinning increases. Good learners greet that spinning with excitement: Oh, goody. I’m about to learn something new. Poor learners greet that movement with anxiety. Oh, no. I don’t know something. I’m in danger. I explained that the way to get rid of it was by allowing the spinning to do what it wanted to do and just observing it. It goes away. We didn’t have time to do the spin release in today’s session. It was just as well. I wanted to give him time to process the idea.

  Eighth-grade K’s mother canceled our session today at the last minute. She waited until I had signed in and texted her.