Tuesday, April 18, 2023

Tuesday, April 18, 2023

Steven's mom called me at six thirty in the morning. It was when she was free. Steven was in school, and her first meeting was twenty minutes away. He was zooming ahead. They talked about the sounds in words every day. It was a fun activity. Steven's mom shared a video of Steven talking about the planets. He gave a presentation from memory worthy of a functioning high functioning high schooler. I wrote to his mom, saying that she had a problem. It was partially a joke, but only partially.

In our culture, we value high-functioning people. If a mom has a super bright kid like Steven, she thinks she hit the jackpot. It was a Puerto Rican welfare mother, an English student of mine, who taught me a different point of view. She said in her community, parents are concerned if their child is exceptional. Raising a special child, whether the child is exceptionally low functioning or exceptionally high functioning, is irrelevant. They are both problems.

I remember reading once that there is a tragedy in everyone's life. Still, the greatest tragedy is to have your tragedy be exceptional. If we share the same problem, we're okay. 

Steven's mom and I discussed problems in school with his teacher. She refuses to make any modifications for Steven. I can understand Steven's mom's point of view, but classroom teachers can't afford to think like that. Teaching a group of twenty-plus kids is hard enough. Focusing on each child's individuality is crazy-making.

Classroom teachers must think in terms of types. Here's an analogy. We are exposed to many kinds of fonts, all variations in letter formation. Think of having to consider those differences as you read. With any luck, you're hardly aware of them. Reading would become impossible if you focused on those details. Similarly, teachers think in terms of grade placement. This child is a first-grader; this is what they should learn and what I must teach.

Many years ago, this wonderful principal shared his insights about me. He said I was very unusual. Most people who thought as I did leave teaching children and went into higher education. Wow! What a gift. I thought something was wrong with me, that I couldn't adjust to the classroom. However, this is where I belonged. If I'd gone into college teaching, I would never have developed the teaching methods I did. It would have been another box. I don't do well in boxes. Working with kids who had problems learning permitted me to focus on how people learn and address issues at that level. While it makes me sad beyond words to see my accomplishments all wind up in the dead letter box, I had a blast developing them, and I have helped hundreds of kids and some adults.

Classroom teachers are comparable to movie directors. They have to hold the big picture; they can't focus on details. They hire people who know their jobs, understand what they want, and give it to them. When it comes to acting, helping an individual actor make those adaptations is up to the acting coach. They work with the actor one on one. It's unreasonable to ask a director to do the job of the acting coach or the acting coach to do the job of the director.

On the other hand, I have heard actors talk about directors who understand the actor's perspective because they have been actors themselves. Some directors are better at adapting their direction for actors. I have never heard acting coaches criticized for being unable to direct a film, just directors for being insensitive to the needs of the actors. Teachers have to lead classrooms of children for a whole year. No movie director faces a challenge like that, and movie directors are well-paid with plenty of vacation time between films.

I finally sprayed the crepe myrtle in front of the house. I hope I did it early enough before the sun was too high in the sky. I used horticultural oil to kill dust mites. If you apply that stuff when the sun is high, the oily substance can act as a magnifying glass, damaging the leaves.

I made a fruit salad with yogurt and granola for lunch. I usually buy fresh blueberries. They last a surprisingly long time. Last time, I decided to try the frozen ones. Well, that was a disaster. I can't take them out of the freezer and use them; they have to be defrosted before they taste like blueberries. The defrosted blueberries go bad more quickly than the fresh, unfrozen ones.

I heard a creak in my attic while typing today's entry. Whenever I hear such a sound, I remember when a house guest heard something walk across my roof. I didn't hear it then, and I had never heard anything before or since. However, yesterday, Paulette told me how the rats ran across Judy's metal roof at night until they had the huge tree overhanging their house cut back. The rats here are Polynesian. They live in trees during the day and come out at night. The island is awash in rats and mongooses. Why? The mongoose was imported to kill the rats. Only one small problem: the rats are nocturnal, and the mongooses are diurnal. They never meet. How about a bit of research before setting a plan in motion?

 I was stunned the other day to learn that people born blind can learn to see after corrective surgery. I had learned there were neurological windows for learning. The brain could never recover if you didn't get the necessary sensory exposure in that window. If I understood what I read correctly, a blind person's brain can adjust after corrective surgery in two years.

If you need clarification about this, here's the issue. While the eyes transmit information about the outside world, our brains make sense of it. Babies aren't born understanding what they're seeing or feeling. There's a good chance they don't know where they end, and the crib begins. They learn it over time. I don't know how long it takes to realize that basic distinction or how long it takes to learn to see, but it does require learning.

When blind people come out of corrective surgery, they can't understand what they see. It's all an abstract painting. It takes the brain two years to learn. The implications are enormous. This is a testimony to neuroplasticity. It means we can overcome any deficit.

I had a session with third-grade J and his sister, first-grade Iz. Third-grade J has no learning issues; he has trouble controlling his anger. He told his parents he was angry because they weren't together. Their parents aren't just divorced; they are often in conflict. The father is an active alcoholic who writes terrible texts to the mother, unpublishable. The mother is often overreactive when things don't go her way. I dealt with J as with KPS; I told him about my own and other survivors' stories.

I told him to keep an eye on his adulthood. At eighteen, he will be out of his parents' care. He had to decide who he wanted to be. Did he want to be like his dad? If not, he had to start figuring out other ways to deal with difficult situations. I affirmed that his situation was difficult and not his fault. He did nothing to cause these problems. They were there before he was born.

I also told him Brooke Shields's story. Her mom was an alcoholic. She said she worried about keeping her alive. Children who have unreliable parents worry about stuff like that. I listed the people who would be there for him, his grandmother and uncle. He would be safe. I asked if this story helped. He said yes. He said yes to all the stories I told.

I also told him that while he had to be the adult, his parents had the legal right to that adult status. I told him what my father said when I tried to disobey him. He said he didn't have to be right; it was his legal responsibility to make decisions for me, and I had to respect that until I was of legal age. I loved that he didn't declare he was right because he was the adult, and I was wrong because I was the child. Parental authority isn't based on who's right and who's wrong. There is only a statistical chance that the adult's point of view is better than the child's.

I told him another story: I told my uncle I was so unhappy when I was seventeen. He said, "Compared to the rest of the world, your suffering is trivial. Some people suffer much worse circumstances. But everyone's suffering is relative to their own experience." I told J about the children in Ukraine who have lost their parents and are wandering alone in bombed-out cities. Some words Shelly taught me came out of my mouth. I feel your pain. All this calmed him. It has a calming effect on kids when I tell them stories about adults who suffered difficult childhoods.

When I told J that childhood is hard, he agreed. Are there some who have easy childhoods and are truly carefree? I hope so. That wasn't my case, and it's not J's.

I worked with his first-grade sister next. Something had happened to the computer, and we couldn't connect. We met by Facetime. Iz wanted to read a book to me. She read the story of the Princess and the Pea. It's at least a high first-grade level. She missed an easy word to decode. She will need a bit more training on decoding, but she is doing well.

I watched the rest of the movie Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris. Lovely! Highly recommend it. It has a happy ending that's not soppy.