December 29, 2024

 December 29, 2024  

      I had a session with fourth-grade MH.  I continued working on comprehension using EB. White’s Trumpet of the Swan.  She’s been doing pretty well with it, but I have the nagging feeling she’s not on top of it.  I decided to try it with her because of my success with what I call the Phonics Discovery System Phase III.  Wow! Within the first few minutes, a problem was exposed, demonstrating again what a fantastic diagnostic tool this process is.  

      I used material from the first unit of  Barnell Loft’s Drawing Conclusions D  that would probably be considered high third-grade material.  I dictated the sentence, “Before the 1800s, people didn’t have right or left shoes.” Fourth-grade MH said, repeating the sentence, “In the 1900s, people didn’t have right or left feet.”  MH has a history of interpreting what people say in bizarre ways.  This is an example.  She is much better than when I started with her, but she still has problems. 

   My first conclusion was that she had an auditory processing problem. The question is, why?  It could be neurological damage; it could be some interference in that area of the brain caused by trauma, or it could be nothing more than habit.  From the work we did using the BrainManagementSkills, it does seem to be nothing more than a habit.

   When I asked her where in her brain she recalled the words I spoke, she pointed to the back of the right side of her head, the primary visual cortex.  MH loves to draw and is very good at it.  That made sense. I have discovered that people sometimes use an inappropriate part of the brain for a task, such as using the visual part for auditory processing.  I theorize people do that because they are particularly good at a task using that part of the brain, as MH is in art.  Then, she uses the visual part of the brain for auditory processing.

   I discovered this about forty years ago when I worked with a seventh-grade boy. When I gave Bob some nonsense words, he couldn’t repeat them.  I took out my pitch pipe, played a note, and asked him where he  ‘remembered ‘ it in his brain as if he felt the ‘memory’ of that note. He pointed to his right temple.  That confused me.  He used what I knew was the auditory center of the brain. Why couldn’t he remember the words?  I picked up the pitch pipe to try again. He said, “It was an F#.” The boy had perfect pitch.

  I told him to listen to the words with the left side of his brain. Bingo! He had no trouble repeating the nonsense words then. Bob had great success using the right side of his brain, which is designed for music. As a young child, he chose to use what he knew worked well.  But it didn’t work well for everything related to sound.  It was an understandable mistake. 

  I only saw Bob for that one session.  Several years later, I ran into his mother. She said, “Remember, you helped Bob in one session.” Bob must have been using the left side of his brain for auditory processing at some level.  How we use our bodies and our brains is ingrained.  Changing those habits takes conscious effort. Some students can make that change after a fifteen-minute session; some take many sessions to switch, even if there is no interference.

    I can dictate whole sentences with some of my students, and their recall is almost perfect. If it’s off, they write a few words differently while retaining the meaning of the original sentence.  I don’t correct these students if it’s at the end of a long sentence, and they’ve consistently demonstrated good auditory recall on shorter sentences. With MH, I gave her three or four words at a time.  That worked for her.

    MH often sketches while we work.  I am comfortable with that as long as she can also focus on our work. I believe she used the drawing to comfort herself.  It may be that divided attention reduced the full value of the session. I think undue stress causes more of a problem.  I consider discomfort, no less fear, a distraction interfering with the learning process.  If sketching helps soothe her, I was all for it.

  When I dictated the third sentence in the passage: “Before the 1800s, people didn’t have right or left shoes. They had shoes of just one shape they used for both feet. When people first saw right and left shoes, they laughed.” Even though we talked about it, MH heard feet again instead of shoes. I have no idea at this point why she went back to feet when the possibility of people not having right and left feet was absurd.  I told her to reread the passage and see what it was about. When she did, she corrected her error. 

   While improving her auditory processing skills will help, I don’t know what could cause her to substitute the word feet for shoes.  I understand that feet and shoes are both at the end of the leg. They have that in common, but why a ten-year-old would think there was a period when people didn’t have right and left feet eluded me. What kind of an image does she have in her mind for that expression? Does she imagine there was ever a time when people didn’t have feet or their feet didn’t look different? Has she never noticed that her feet look different?