Wednesday, November 22, 2023

 Wednesday, November 22, 2023

     I gained remarkable insights with Twin E of Mama K’s crew and Adolescent D the other day. With Twin E, I learned she could only hold three letters at a time in her visual working memory. She could see wor of the word but not the final d. I had no fix for it because no one had ever reported something like that before. I had students who reported not ‘seeing’ anything in their visual memory, including E, but I had never seen this. The working memory is supposed to hold 7+/- 2 bits of information at a time.  

   The 7+/- 2 bits of information do not mean we can only hold up to nine letters in our working memory; we can chunk. When studying for a test, I will remember categories. I can focus on one of those categories and see nine subcategories. I can repeat that process repeatedly until I get down to the details. However, in the case of E, we focused on remembering words by sight for reading or spelling.  

    E had a reduced ‘screen.’ Was she only using one side of the brain? Was the small screen size caused by a neurological problem? She was the one who fell out of a second-story window when she learned to crawl. The doctors saw no damage, but who knows. The best I could do the other day was talk about enlarging the screen size and making a change in the brain.

   Today, she could see all four letters in word and had it memorized. She tried the procedure on the word there. She was able to hold all five of those letters. She confused there and three. We’ll see. Whatever, she identified all the words in the second Fry Sight Word List. She told me the words were too hard when I first had her work on it. I am very excited.  

   In my experience, if I share my thoughts on the process of using brain modification, the students will spontaneously make the necessary changes on their own. No, I don’t think they ‘know’ what they’re doing. It’s like removing a log from a stream to allow the water to flow freely.

   The book Remember triggered some of my thoughts. Lisa Genova emphasized the difference between recall and recognition. While the kids recall the name of the word spelled by the letters when they use flashcards, the method I described above uses recall of all aspects of the word, both the letters and the name of the word.

   I’m reminded of Fernald’s memory practice. She has the students write the fact they want to remember, let’s say 3x6=18, then cover it and write the same fact beneath it; cover both and write the fact a third time. She recommended doing it five times. The procedure I use is all mental; there is no sensory input or output. It’s so obvious. It’s taken me thirty years to discover it on my own. While I am sure good students, including me, have used this method to memorize material forever, I wonder if anyone else uses it with students with memory problems. They’re the ones who don’t learn the mental tricks they need to become good students.

   Adolescent D finally described his perceptual problem, something else I had never heard described that way before. He said his mind would say the letter sounded backward because his mind would suddenly switch from moving from left to right to right to left. I have asked this boy repeatedly for information on his perceptual problems. I need the students to tell me how they experience perceptual interference. I didn’t have a solution. Answers come to me when I meditate.

  I often pound the desk (metaphorically), telling D to use cross-body blending. When I did it the other day, he smugly said, “ I got the word without using cross-body blending.” I started working with him when he was thirteen. His ego was already up and running. That I got him to do anything I told him to do was a miracle. 

He knew everything already. He knew how to read and was not making any progress with me. I asked him, “If you knew how to read already, why didn’t you?” That stumped him. He said, “ I don’t know.”

   Thinking about D’s problem, which he says is not as bad as it used to be, I realized we do move back and forth as we read, particularly on words we don’t already know. I teach if we come across a word when we don’t immediately recognize the type of vowel unit, en, ene, er, ee, or e, which allows us to easily add on the beginning letters of the syllable. We must start with isolated letters and blend the vowel unit (the vowel and the following consonant (s) ) together first. That means we start in the middle of the word and then go back and pick up the letters to the right. If we do move right to left as well as left to right, how do we discern between the two? We need to move from left to right when blending the elements of the word as a whole, so the letters el are pronounced as /el/instead of /le/. When moving from left to right, we blend; when moving from right to left, we identify the parts to be blended. Of course, we also do the latter when moving from left to right. Maybe, hopefully, D’s ego is strong enough to endure blending drills with lots of cross-body blending.