Joey had opened the middle desk drawer and was fiddling around inside.
“Close the drawer, please, Joey.” He had already explored it several times on other visits. I wanted his complete attention now.
Some part of Joey was always in motion, touching this and opening that. He did it unconsciously, not really aware of what he was doing. He had no real concept of what belonged to him and what didn’t. Whatever was in reach was fair game. Before he could change, he would have to become aware of what he was doing.
Joey replaced the box of rubber bands he’d been playing with, and I said, “Good. Pay yourself twenty, that’s two blues or one red chip, for following directions so quickly.
“Now let me show you what we’re going to do today. This is your notebook; this is your bin. This is where we’ll keep the things you’re working on. Would you please write your name on the notebook?”
“Can I use the Magic Marker you got in the drawer?”
I laughed. This was the child that was reported to be unaware of his surroundings? “Sure,” I said. “It doesn’t erase, though.”
Joey got out the pen and then looked through the black and white marbleized notebook, blank except for the first page, where I’d made out our schedule for the day. He turned back to the cover.
“Maybe I’ll just do it in pencil first. In case. You know?”
“Good thinking, Joey – pay another twenty.”
Joey’s turn to laugh. “Twenty for just thinking? Thinking’s easy.”
“Maybe,” I said, “but it’s the most important part. You’re lucky you’re good at it.”
“Yeah,” Joey answered, writing his J backward with his left hand and then scrubbing it out with his eraser and making it correctly. The o came out fine, but somehow when he made the e it overlapped the o. Joey attacked it with the eraser again.
As he rubbed away, Joey looked over at me, grinned, and said, “This old eraser sure does have a hard life, doesn’t it?”
How could I have missed having Joey in my life?
After Joey had written his name in pencil and gone over it with the black marker, I took his folder from his bin and showed him how he’d done on each test.
Joey was only mildly interested, and I decided to be clearer. “The main thing is,” I said, “I want you to know you’re smart, so you don’t have to go around shouting ’bout how dumb you are and falling out of your chair.”
“I can’t help that.”
“Maybe.”
“And I am dumb. I’m the only one in my reading group. There’s the Eagles and the Robins and the Bluebirds. And then there’s me, all by myself. I don’t even got the name of any old kind of a bird.”
“I didn’t say you could read well. I said you were smart. There’s a difference.”
“What?”
“If you’re smart, you can learn to read better – if I can teach you the right way and if you work hard enough.”
Joey was going to be a difficult child to help, because testing had not shown either his visual or his auditory processing to be an area of strength. I had a suspicion that Joey’s auditory skills were better than the tests had shown and that the low scores in this area were more than likely due to lack of attending. His spoken language was so clear and he had picked up so much information that I felt his auditory reception couldn’t be that bad, even if he couldn’t repeat a string of numbers. Anxiety could also have interfered; it’s hard to remember anything when you’re scared. Later, the audiologist confirmed that there was no physical impairment in his auditory channels.
I decided to use a combination of methods to teach Joey to read until I discovered which one worked best. The biggest thing Joey had going for him was his intelligence. If he could see that reading was like a code, the letters standing for certain sounds depending on their position, then he could learn to crack the code.
It was important for Joey to understand that 85 percent of reading is made up of decodable words; the other 15 percent would be designated red words. I would print these red words on index cards in red ink and ask Joey to memorize them. But that was the only memorization I would ask for; the rest of the words he could figure out by using the rules. The books that I gave Joey to read would have a carefully controlled vocabulary, using words that followed the rules he had already learned. I was counting on the fact that someone as independent as Joey would love being able to figure it all out himself.
The spelling and writing would go hand in hand with the reading. Once a child has learned to read “hat,” he can also learn to write it, if he is taught how to match graphemes (letters) to phonemes (sounds). We would incorporate Orton-Gillingham methods, and I would have Joey visualize the word – saying it out loud, writing it on the desk, sand tray, or paper.
I would be careful not to ask him to spell words that were not phonetically regular, and I would also be careful not to present too much new information at one time. I felt that much of Joey’s trouble was that when he was given too much at one time he became overwhelmed. I suspected that this was when he fell out of his chair.
That first morning I simply told Joey the sound of each letter and showed him how to write both the lowercase and capitals. “See it, hear it, say it, write it, Joey. Take your time.” This wasn’t easy for Joey. He confused the sounds for b and p and, of course, reversed many letters. Still, his writing improved enormously in that one short session as he learned how to form each letter correctly and to say its sound as he wrote it.
I knew I was beginning at the beginning and that I was running the risk of boring him since all this had been presented in first grade and probably earlier, but I also knew the risk was slight.
Few learning disabled children are bored. They may pretend they are or their parents may like to think they are, but most are scared instead. Neither they nor their parents can understand how they can know something one day and not the next. Usually this is because they haven’t learned the beginning steps of a task thoroughly enough to use them spontaneously and “on demand,” and particularly when they’re under pressure to perform.
In any event, we both got so involved with what we were doing that we ran five minutes into the next child’s session. Still, we took the time to count up Joey’s chips and to enter the total, 840, in his notebook and then subtract 600 for the sugarless, all-natural-ingredient lollipop that he bought from the “goody basket.” I kept a small supply of treats in a wicker basket on top of the file cabinet, and at the end of each session the children had one minute to decide if they wanted to spend their chips or save them up.
Twice a week through June and July, Joey and I read and wrote and spelled together. We added and subtracted.
We also talked and played a few games. There were no miracles. I just taught and retaught and let Joey practice and end with success each time. His ability to decode and his sight vocabulary both improved; his writing became more legible and computation more accurate. I assigned small amounts of homework, which Joey did on his own and, even more important, remembered to bring back.
He still twisted in his chair and fiddled
