Saturday, March 22, 2025

 Saturday, March 22, 2025  

    I texted Mama K about doing a session with the girls at 8 a.m. I hadn’t heard back from her. I signed on anyway. I sent her the ‘sent’ text, signaling I was on. She called to tell me Papa K was home and would get the girls on. When I checked my texts later, I discovered my ‘sent’ text had not been delivered. She called me on her initiative. 

   There has been a change in her attitude over the years. I’ve been working with the Twins regularly since the end of first grade; they are now in fifth. Initially, you would have thought she was doing me a favor. I was that annoying lady who wanted to work with her kids. I didn’t have anything better to do. (That last part has some truth to it.) Now, she works with me. I told her once that she thought her girls were hopeless, so why bother? Now, she saw they could learn, and she was on board. She chuckled in response.

   Yesterday, Mama K was unbraiding Twin E’s hair as I worked with her. We reviewed her last story, which was about a trip to the beach. Twin E said it took an hour to get there. Mama K laughed. She said the beach was at the end of the block, and it took less time to get there than any other beach.

   Both girls have a learning problem; everything must be taught explicitly. When it is, they do learn.  Maybe, at some point, I will figure out how to teach them to figure things out for themselves. For now, I set up a way to teach a sense of distance. Knowing the familiar routes, E should guess how long it will take to get from point A to point B. When they get there, their mom can tell them how long it took.

   I worked on the dictation/spelling exercise this morning with Twin E. It was her choice. We ran into the use of the a versus an before of a word beginning with a vowel letter.  She doesn’t say /an/. She uses the short /u/ sound before consonants, as in a book, a tree, or a bed. She uses the long /a/ sound before vowels, such as /a/ apple, /a/ elephant, /a/ igloo, /a/ octopus, and /a/ umbrella.  It used to be that the before a vowel letter the was pronounced with a long /e/ while the before a consonant a was pronounced with a short /u/.  Now, it’s pronounced a short /u/ before both. Language changes.  I don’t know if Twin E is an example of a broader change in the culture or an auditory processing problem.

  I listened to the book Good Morning, Monster on Audible. It’s a wonderfully written book from a therapist’s cases with people whose childhoods were usually stressful.  Very moving.  I identified with the case of the cold and cruel mother.  The mother in the story made mine look like a pussycat, if not a saint, but there were commonalities.  The good mother in the context of this book is one who holds her child and coos to it.  The therapist took her client to watch videos on Harlow’s Monkeys. This horrendous experiment proved that monkeys, at least, if not humans as well, need love even more than they need food.  Without maternal or paternal comfort, we fear going out into the world.  My mom was a wonderful caretaker, in as much as we were well tended to physically. But she was uncomfortable giving affection.  I saw that with her grandchildren. In addition, like the horrendous mother in Good Morning, Monster, she overdosed us with criticism.   I’m reasonably sure this is the way she was treated as a child.  I think German upbringing at the time emphasized the need to deny children praise.  My mother worked hard to fulfill her parental duties. 

   I found it interesting that the client, who had a hypercritical mother, dealt with it as I did.  He walked out when she became overcritical. In his case, he would skip a routine visit or two before returning. Eventually, she toned down. 

   In the case of the client, his mother suffered worse than mine.  Her mother offered her as a child prostitute. For extra money, the client could burn her with cigarettes.  What produces monsters like that?  My mom may have been tortured, but that wasn’t the intent. She suffered a torturous medical procedure to save her life.

   The book covers several case studies. I just finished listening to one about a Canadian ‘Indian’ who was sent to the Indian reeducation schools to eliminate Indian culture. Besides the tragedy of what happened to these kids, is the tragedy of what happened to their way of life and the life they were subsequently subjected to. What is wrong with us as a species that we think it’s okay to treat animals that way, no less people?

  I learned something about their ideas on childrearing. The Indian way is to model behavior for their children, never to engage in explicit instruction.  The client in this story married a Norwegian woman. She constantly instructed their child, naming objects, etc. The man found that intrusive. You didn’t impinge on others. Conflict avoidance was essential in maintaining cultural stability.  I found that interesting. For that to happen, everything had to be heavily scripted.  Everyone had to know their role. That only works in small groups.  Diversity will creep in in a group larger than 150 people.  Then, a variety of scripts developed, requiring negotiation.

   Back to my theory of historic religious development, religions with one God were a way for both Jews and Muslims to unite all the separate tribes and assure peace. 

   I had an appointment with Fifth-grade GV at 3:30. He had missed his Monday appointment, and this was a make-up session. He had been on a camping trip with his father.  I asked him how the camping trip went. He expressed disappointment.  His younger brother came along.  E is five years younger than GV and is considered high maintenance, not just by GV but also by his grandmother. From GV’s reports, E spends much time being provocatively annoying.  GV says it’s only with him.  His mom says it’s sibling issues.  Maybe, but they still should be resolved when possible. 

   We worked on reading comprehension. Improvement in this area will boost his reading scores considerably. His classroom teacher agreed that GV’s insistence that things make sense to him and that everyone does things his way interferes with his success in school and social areas.

   We hit a block again. I address student’s emotional blocks to learning with a lot of my students. They shut down when it gets complicated.  As a child, I expected someone to make something intelligible to me.  I whined and cried, “I don’t understand. I don’t understand.”  It was grueling.  I also had a definition of what it meant to understand.  It was agony when I didn’t. The kids I work with shut down quickly. Some can’t hear my voice any more or can’t make sense of what I’m saying. 

   I knew things I could do to help GV, but none of them felt ‘right.’ I sat with the not knowing.  How did that make him feel?  He said, uncomfortable. Interesting. Many students say it makes them feel better.  I assumed it was because I don’t rush to define them. I will think about it until I find the right thing for them.  GV didn’t feel that way. I don’t understand why.  I prefer someone to back off and think than rush into an action.  Of course, the feeling I get is within me. It could be for my benefit more than his. I have no way of being sure about that. It’s just the best I can do.  It is better to wait and do nothing than rush in and do the wrong thing. Now, I have to consider that waiting may be the wrong thing. I still didn’t think it was in this case.

    I kept asking questions to gain clarity.  GV told me about one incident that turned things around for him.  He said everything was easy until letters were introduced in preschool.  I asked, as I always do, does the prefrontal cortex, pointing to that part of the head, distinguishing it from the back of the head, believe he’s in danger if he can’t do it the way someone else is? No.  Did he believe his parents would stop loving him, or he would be killed? No, he said that in a clear and strong voice. Did he remember an incident when he felt hurt because he couldn’t do something? Yes. When he was about five, a boy who had been his friend came up to him and asked him to spell a word; when he couldn’t, the boy ran away and never spoke to him again.  I got that he interpreted that to mean the boy rejected him because he couldn’t spell the word. I reframed it.  Could the boy be focused on finding out how to spell the word? He ran up to GV and asked him, but when he couldn’t, he ran to find someone else.  It hadn’t been a test of GV’s spelling skills. That made a dent in his fear.  With GV, finding the key is hard work.