Monday, February 5, 2024

Monday, February 5, 2024

   

I had my first session with twenty-six-year-old S. I started working with her when she was seventeen. She was very disabled. She looked cognitively disabled. After her grandmother told me her story, I asked her how she felt. She said sad. I knew she then she wasn’t ‘retarded.’ Nonetheless, she was a nonreader. I got her reading at a low second-grade level.

   I observed a ‘petite mal’ seizure; at least, that’s what it used to be called. Once I pushed the pediatric neurologist to get her off the Adderall she had been on since she was four, her seizures stopped, and the muscle pain she had suffered for years that prevented her from playing with other children was gone.

  S’s mother called me the other day, asking if I would work with her again. S’s three-year-old daughter was asking her to read books to her; she couldn’t do it. She was depressed. When I asked her if she had more of a problem decoding words or remembering them, she said decoding them. It quickly became apparent she had issues with memory as well. She was counting on decoding to compensate for her poor memory. It is hard to know if there was in-utero damage from the crystal meth her mother was on at the time of her birth or if she just never learned to memorize. The seizures wiped out opportunities to encode information into long-term memory.

  The stats on my blog have shot up, 100-250 views a day. Someone in China is assigning my blog to their English language students. Still no comments. I had trouble downloading the last entry onto the blog site. Sometimes, when I download, the format is different. Instead of the text filling the entire space, I get a small text box. Not only does that change the format, it limits the amount of text. I don’t know how to control it. Trying to find another way, I used Safari instead of Chrome to access the Blogger app. I found an alternate version of my blog. The first entry was January 15, 2019, and the last was June 22, 2022. It has its own readership. The blog I accessed through Safari had a total of 59,906 hits, and it lists current ones. The one I can access through Chrome is up to date and has a total of 76,942 hits. I have no idea how I wound up with two blogs under the same title.

 I met with Mama K’s Twins. All I’m working on these days is polishing their memory skills.

  I met with first-grade B for the first time. She turned out to be a better reader than I expected. Her decoding was good. She had a small problem discerning the difference between d and b. She read from an AR book. She has issues with her reading speed. I asked her mom to send me a copy of the text the teacher had her read. She reads slowly because she has some recall problems. I’m not sure why yet.

  Rene Lemus finally stopped by to appraise my yard and give me an estimate for cleaning up the dropping palm fronds and disposing of them. He promised to come by over and over. I suspect he only is considering the job because I’m the deacon’s widow. Gardeners can pick and choose. It is hard to find someone.

  I watched a video on the Carpenters. Her brother and manager talk matter-of-factly about how they pushed her out front from behind her drum kit. They spoke openly about how she hated being out front. They made her life a misery. They believed she had to do it to make the band viable. Unbelievable. They speak openly about taking advantage of her vulnerability. They had an option. They could have moved the whole drum kit out front. She loved the drums. She loved hiding behind them. The videos are old. I can’t imagine someone hasn’t pointed this out to them.