Tuesday, November 29, 2022

 Tuesday, November 29, 2022

 I had an appointment with the acupuncturist after a three-week break. We usually meet every two weeks. I showed her why the exercises she gave me to open my hips didn't work. My lower legs were so tight; all the action happened there, and it never reached my hips. She did no acupuncture. It was all bodywork. She has a brilliant understanding of the body.

  I have a new Mama K now. How do I distinguish one from the other? One is the mama of K and Twins A & E.; the other is the mama of I and J. I think the new Mama K will be Mama Ke. She wants me to work on her son's anger. He has reason to be angry. His parents have had a hard time. The school called to say that first-grade I was behind in reading. I'll be working with her on that. She made appointments for next week.

  I had an appointment with eighth-grade K. I tried to use the situation with his paper to get him to give more information. I asked him where he was when he was writing the paper. He said, "In a chair." Whoa! While that information was accurate, it didn't answer the question. The only other time I have heard someone answer the question that way was when my husband was in the hospital. He had been there for over a week; he was bedridden and on high doses of painkillers, including fentanyl. A nurse stood at his bedside and asked, "Do you know where you are?" I could see Mike struggling to come up with an answer. His face cleared; he had an answer. With his two Ph. D.s, my brilliant husband turned to the nurse and said, "Here!" An accurate answer but inappropriate. What is going on in this boy's brain that he would answer like "in a chair." I was beginning to wonder if he was out of my range.

 I continued working with WbyW on the 7th-grade level. He does an excellent job parsing the sentences- really excellent. But he has a poor vocabulary and does a poor job with anything to do with meaning or composing sentences on his own. His language skills are very depressed.

      I called his mom after the session. I wanted more information about the way he operated within the family. Did he use more language, or was he mostly silent? She was furious with me for "grilling him" after she had grilled him on his paper; had he cheated? I no longer thought he had. His teacher sent me an email saying she had worked with him extensively. He had worked hard. The ideas were his, but he had a lot of help with the wording, organization, and formatting. I wanted to use the situation to get him to describe the circumstances with greater accuracy and detail.

 Besides having problems getting him to describe a physical situation completely, he denied the teacher had worked with him as long as she claimed. He believed he had written the whole thing with some help on the formatting. His teacher may not be accurate, but I was sure the boy wasn't. No, I didn't think he was lying. I didn't think he knew the difference between the content (the ideas) and the form (the words). For him, his words and hers said what he had in mind; therefore, he wrote it.

  At one point, K's mom said, "He's not as verbal as his younger brother." I said, "There's nothing wrong with being non-verbal. He could make a living hunting and fishing. Then don't push him to be something else." His mom never noticed how little he said. She thought he was a deep thinker. She didn't realize he didn't think at all, at least not with words.

  I understood why his mom was angry with me. I saw K's discomfort but couldn't let go of my objective because I thought the circumstances provided a great teaching opportunity. It didn't. I should have stopped sooner. I apologized. Not much more I could have done.