Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

 

      It was a Ulu Wini day.  Second-grade   KJ worked on low first-grade text. She had trouble seeing the relationship between sentences within the paragraph.

        I reviewed the words: "Jack said, "Snow."   "What did you say?" asked Tom, opening his eyes." Where was Tom when he said that?  She said outside. Like so many poor readers, KJ doesn't visualize the scene. She does not build a picture from the words.

   Third-grade TC did better on the sight words with improved automatic processing.

   Second-grade NV shows slight improvements in word recall.  She says the ones she knows faster but is having trouble learning new ones.  I did a visual exercise with her. I asked her to spell her name and then to recite the letters backward. She was flawless.  Her visual processing of letters is outstanding. I couldn't do this when I first learned it. Why is she having that much problem learning the words? I asked her to 'see' the word and then asked her mind for the name of the word.  It took a while, but it did come up. She told me she lost the word list I gave her. She is making an effort.

  Second-grade MK is moving ahead rapidly. When we started, she couldn't read the first 25 words with ease.  Today, she finished 201-300. This completes the list of sight words through the third grade.  She needed some help with some of the words.  She could 'decode' them accurately without coming up with the correct pronunciation. I worked on using context to figure out the word.  She read earth with a long /e/.  I used the word in a sentence with the pronunciation she decoded. She was a little confused but rapidly caught on to the idea of using context to figure out what the word was.

  Last, I had 6th grade RM and ML. I worked on comprehension. Again, the problem was using the information in the first sentence to understand the meaning in the second.

   When I got home, I had one more session with seventh-grade RC. This situation has had an unpleasant impact. I have seen improvement in RC's spelling and reading.  However, when I ask her if she sees an improvement, she says, "I don't know. "Drives me crazy. To boot, her mother whines about her spelling.   She misspelled words on her birthday request list in November. I asked her mother to have RC write the same words now. She didn't do that, so I asked her to do it. She wanted one of three vinyl records. She misspelled the word vinyl.  She spelled the names of the artists perfectly.  Okay, she misspelled one word three times.  I started believing her mother suffered from a form of Munchhausen's. I wanted out.

   Today, I upped the grade level of the work.  Today, RC told me the teacher marks her spelling, and she makes many mistakes. This is the first I heard of it. She agreed her problem was with multi-syllable words. I just had her spell multisyllabic words from a seventh-grade text.  When she works with me, she represents all the sounds.  When she spells on her own, she doesn't. She didn't include the n in vinyl; she spelled it viyl.  Her problem is a problem I find with many kids.  They have greater difficulty identifying the syllables in a word than they do identifying the phonemes.  My instructions are: 1. Identify the individual syllables 2. Then, focus on one syllable at a time, ignoring the others. This proves difficult for the students I work with.  I don't know how it plays out in the general population.

    However, what I learned today is RC has problems with visual recall.  My Ulu Wini kids can do the Neurolinguistic Program's visual exercise with ease.  They can spell their names forward and backward. Then, they can't 'see' an unfamiliar word. With these kids, there is no conscious control over their mental processes. They're naïve learners. RC is not naïve. Her verbal skills are quite sophisticated. Well, I thought that from something she read to me, she said she had written. When I was her age, I copied text right out of the encyclopedia.

   I asked if she enjoyed drawing. Yes. Ah, that's a right brain activity. Spelling requires left-brain involvement. I told her to focus on the left side.

   When we focus our conscious attention on a part of our body, the nervous system directs blood to provide the fuel for whatever we need.  I had RC focus on her hand first so she could feel the difference. Then, on the left side of her brain. She has to hold her focus there when she retrieves a word from her long-term memory. We worked on the word victim, the last word we had worked on before I started the protocol for focusing on the visual working memory for letters.  She recalled v-i-c-t-i.  That was pretty good for someone who never used this process before.

   About 7 o'clock, my phone rang. It was the leader of the Grief Recovery Class. She told me it would be better for me if I dropped out of the class.  The class process couldn't help me; my pain was too great.  I had wept deeply over something that my mother witnessed in Nazi Germany on the streets of Berlin.  I told her I had already benefited from the class. She should stop bull-shitting me. She was uncomfortable with me because I challenged something she said.  I was incompatible with the process.  No, I liked the process, so I named three things I liked. There was only one thing I thought was wrong, and it wasn't even wrong with the program. It was her presentation that was wrong.  A slight modification would eliminate the problem.

   She kept trying to convince me this was all for my benefit, which was almost comical. She was a rigid thinker and couldn't tolerate someone who would challenge her thinking. As it turns out, it had less to do with her thinking than her verbal expression skills.

   She stayed on the phone with me for over an hour. Kudos to her. I have had trained therapists who wouldn't engage in meaningful dialogue with me.  The situation resolved after she told me 'about her experience' with another group. They refused to/couldn't follow the program protocol. In the small groups, it's one person talking at a time.  The listeners do not ask questions, make comments, or make suggestions. The listeners don't touch the speaker or offer them a tissue.  The listeners just listen. They can nod, laugh when appropriate, and even cry. But that's it. The group she had trouble with didn't follow those rules. The leader disbanded the group and offered to work with the participants individually. Only one person accepted her offer. That person explained the other participants had participated in another grief program. They couldn't adapt to the Grief Recovery program's method. I asked her why she was telling me this. She said because it was her experience. Yes, but why was she telling me the story. Because I had participated in another grief program. No, I had not. Oh.  The penny dropped. She finally could hear I appreciated the genius of this program.  Wow!  Did she ever lay a trip on me!  This happens to me a lot. 

   I appreciated I scared her.  That did concern me.  That and the possibility that my intense crying scared the other students.  I know several appreciated my speaking out or agreed with my objections. That couldn't be the problem.  I was concerned that I would be the only one attending the class on Wednesday.  If they were uncomfortable, or even if the teacher was ineffective, I was prepared to drop out. However, I didn't trust the teacher's perception of the situation, not when she was ready to lay such bogus trips on me. That suggested she was out of touch with reality. We would see where it would go tomorrow.