Conference moira::parenting_v3

    First thoughts -
    
    Why is she in the tutoring program?
    How has she succeeded in getting to the 5th grade?
    What are the positives - what does she know?
    
    I hear the horror stories about American public schools, but there are
    bright spots.  If I were the tutor I would try to find out where to
    start.  If she really needs help with the basics, you may already have
    the tools you need.  What about her own schoolbooks and workpapers? Can
    you use them as teaching aids?
    
    It seems that there is so much to tackle, that you need to prioritize. 
    Figure out what she needs help with most and go from there.  You should
    set realistic goals and remember that it is a major undertaking to
    improve on all of her skills.  Take it one step at a time.
    
    Good luck.  It's a very important job that you are doing.
    
    Mary

re .1

She is in the program because she is from the "inner city" - single parent 
home, poor, disadvantaged, disenfranchised, etc. - and needs help.  I 
am suppose to be her tutor as well as be a positive role model.  I am
concentrating on the tutoring part first.  The role modelling hopefully
will fall into place as time goes by. 

She is excited about being in the program.  She seems eager to learn.  
I read the newspaper to her and by god she was impressed!  She can read, 
but not at a 10-year old level.  She reads simple words and doesn't have 
the skills to tackle the more difficult ones.  I'm not sure how she
managed to get to the grade she's in. Most likely she slipped
through the cracks due to lack of attention.  I hope I can provide the
attention she needs to get her back on track with time. 

I have access to her schoolbooks and workpapers.  She brings them to 
our sessions.  

My problem is that I don't know where or how to begin. I don't know how
to teach someone to read properly or to count properly. I feel a little
overwhelmed, a little bit in over my head.  (Can you tell I'm not
a parent? :-))  So your suggestion to take it one step at a time is very 
useful. 

I will visit the children's section of the library this week for more
clues on how and where to start.  

thanks.

Karen

    Karen, I am curious: what do you consider your ultimate goal?
    i.e. are you to try and bring her up to the level of her classmates,
    or are you going to try and steer away from a school system that may
    be inadequate for any child to learn properly?
    If you can gain some exposure to other children in her age group,
    inside or outside of class, it might give you a better idea as to where 
    to start. Not all workbooks, texts, etc reflect the learning that goes
    on in the class at that age. 
    I have deep respect for you in working and tutoring; I think its a
    grand idea, and probably the only way (i.e. parental/tutorial help)
    that kids will get the attention they need to enjoy learning. 
    Don't forget a few learning games! 
    
    Monica

    I think that the first thing I would do is to visit her school and
    her teachers. Seeing her with her peers might help you learn how she
    relates to others and how best to guide her. This might also help you
    develop a sense of what to expect from someone her age. I would think
    that her teachers would be eager to help you help her (it will help
    take the load off them!). They might be able to help you create a
    lesson plan or point you to teaching aids/resources.
    

    Karen,
    
    I've had a bit of education in the area of teaching reading both
    to children and adults, but not much practical experience, so take
    the following with a large grain of salt and a regular reality
    check. 
    
    Are you dealing with "Black" English Dialect?  Kids who speak BED
    outside of school have a great deal of difficulty learning to read
    from the standard reading texts used in most average U.S. schools.  
    BED would more properly be called "City English"; many city whites
    and hispanics speak it and many blacks, especially in New England,
    don't.  If she does things like leaves off the -s at the end of
    third person verbs ("she leave off the s") this is probably part
    of the problem and I've got a book you can borrow that has a lot
    of practical tips.  
    
    I presume the possibility of learning disability has been checked
    and eliminated.  I also presume that we aren't dealing with
    English as a second language. 
    
    Texts about helping someone catch up in reading emphasize that
    it's important to use materials aimed at the person's age level
    and interests, not at their reading level.  You don't want to
    throw anything terribly difficult or obtuse at her, but she'll get
    bored if you use second-grade texts just because she's reading at
    a second-grade level.  People generally learn to read best when
    it's part of something else they're interested in doing (hearing a
    good tale, finding out about a hobby, peeping on the lifestyles of
    the rich and famous.)
    
    You don't have to use something with the  redeeming social value
    and serious intent of a textbook or classroom material.  In fact,
    ordinary things that the person wants to read during the course of
    their everyday life work best.  Many tutors have used USA Today,
    Time, Newsweek, People, Sports Illustrated (there's an SI for kids
    now too), and Seventeen with great success. 
    
    So try asking her what she's interested in reading, and go with
    that.  USA Today would be good if she's interested in the news,
    and then you can move on to Time or Newsweek, or a more
    sophisticated newspaper, as she catches up.  The articles will
    probably drag in a lot of other subjects like geography and
    politics and history and social trends.  (For instance, try
    explaining what an article about David Duke means without getting
    into what happened in World War II.)  
    
    There are several publishers with lines of books that present
    interesting sophisticated stories written in a more
    straightforward style.  My bibliographies are outdated but I can
    get you the names of some of the publishers if you'd like. 
    
    An alternative would be regular young adult literature (ask a
    librarian for advice) that you can help her read in small
    segments.  If she has enough basic reading skills to piece out
    words, her vocabulary and skills will probably improve so fast it
    will leave your head spinning.  
    
    As far as writing -- again, it usually comes along the best in the
    context of another purpose.  A technique that's often effective is
    to have her keep a journal of her reading, noting her questions
    and reactions.  It's important at this stage to make it clear that
    the journal itself isn't going to be corrected, that she can write
    whatever comes out without worrying about spelling or punctuation. 
    Then when she does write papers or essays or whatever, you can
    work on presentation aspects.  But generally when you're reading
    competent English prose, you'll find yourself automatically
    echoing it as you write more and more, without having to work
    directly on the mechanics.  
    
    When I was teaching writing, I had a lot of success emphasizing
    the paragraph -- topic sentences, development, supporting your
    statements, tactics of argument, and so on.  It seemed to be a
    good nonintimidating level that lets the student develop
    competence that can be expanded upward to whole essays or downward
    to sentence structure.  Also, mechanical weaknesses in the grammar
    are less noticeable in a strong structure.
    
    If the phonics confusions you cite don't clear up just in the
    process of improved reading and writing, you might need more
    specialized help. 
    
    If her parent can't read, you *might* run across the emotional
    issue that she doesn't want to pass her parent or show them up. 
    Try to present it as a valuable skill, not a moral issue, so she
    doesn't think that her parent's lack of reading ability is a
    failure on her parent's part.  
    
    And even if it's abundantly clear that the reason she can't read
    well now is incompetent teachers, even if you discover her present
    teacher is part of the problem, try not to undermine their
    authority any more than you have to.  You may want to do something
    outside the tutoring to deal with the teacher, but in the long run
    undercutting the teacher as a role model backfires.  There's
    seldom a teacher so bad you can't learn anything from them, once
    you learn how to learn.  
    
    I have several "teacher's editions" of writing texts that you're
    welcome to borrow if you'd like -- they're a bit outdated, but
    probably still useful.
    
    I've kind of rambled on here -- I hope some of it's useful.  
    
    --bonnie
    
    p.s.  I don't know whether you were doing this or not, but don't
    assume that just because she's from a single-parent inner-city
    family, her parent hasn't been involved in her education.  That 
    might be and is often the case, but there are many reasons why a
    child falls behind in reading.  Also, even if the parent hasn't
    been involved, it's as likely to be lack of time or lack of
    knowledge as it is lack of concern.  
    

Most schools (and most teachers) have one style of teaching.  Many children
have styles of learning that are incompatible with this.  From your comments
about her being unable to see the similarity between groups of letters, I'd
guess that she's been taught reading via the look-say ("Dick and Jane")
method.  Her inability to read near grade-level tells me that this is
the wrong method for her.

Bonnie assumes that she's been tested for learning disabilities.  I assume
she hasn't, or hasn't been tested adequately.  School systems have a vested
interest in *not* finding LDs.  I'd suggest you take a look at
ASABET::LEARNING_DISABILITIES (KP7 or SELECT to add to your notebook),
particularly the dyslexia note (no, it doesn't just mean letter reversals).
There are various methods that are used successfully in teaching dyslexics
how to read.  These methods are also very successful in teaching non-dyslexics,
so much so that a few school districts have adopted them for all children.
Depending on how involved you want to get, you might look into the
Orton-Gillingham method or Project Read.  You might also try to find out
if she's been tested for LDs, and what the results were.  You'll probably
have to do this in cooperation with her parents, since you're an outsider
with no legal rights as far as the school system is concerned.

    re: .6
    
    Clarification -- I meant that the rest of my answer assumed that
    learning disabilities weren't a factor, not that the girl Karen's
    tutoring had been tested.  You're right, I should have suggested
    checking that out.  
    
    I can personally testify that dyslexics can learn to read and read
    very well.  It's one of my gripes that most of the research and
    testing in learning disabilities is done using people who haven't
    succeeded in the school systems; they focus on what's wrong rather
    than on what works.  But I digress. 
    
    --bonnie

Reading about not being able to subtract 20 from 50 but being able to
take 20 cents from 50 cents rings so many bells it's incredible.  My
brother was like this ... he had all kinds of difficulties trying to
take anything in that was an abstract.

Numbers on their own meant nothing.
Letters or phonics or syllables on their own meant nothing.

Once he grasped that a particular word meant something, he could read
the word, but print that word in caps, or a different style and it was
a differrent word.  Break the word into syllables and it was no longer
the same word.  for example the word "radio":  once he grasped that that
was the word for radio, he could read it ... but this was not RADIO,
nor was this Radio, nor was this ra-di-o.  Breaking into phonics was
therefore useless, Phonetics was useless.

He was originally labelled as a dunce, but he was really quite an
intelligent kid.  School branded him as a slow learner ... It wasn't
until secondary school at baout age 12 that we finally convinced the
school to test him and the diagnosis was dyslexia.  He didn't fit the
common ideas of dyslexia.  THe results of the discovery varied.  Some
teachers understood and modified their teaching style to suit his way
of comprehension better, and others continued the belief that it was
only parents looking to put a label on their kid to get him special
treatment.  This was in the days when school psychologists were akin
to witch doctors.

Well, my brother still has some problems as an adult, but, time has made
things a lot better for him.  Maturity and the realisation that he was
not esn (educationally sub-normal) (stupid) but just learning disabled
went a long way to improve our treatment of him, and hence his self-
confidence.  Lack of self-confidence can wreck their ability to learn
even in their own ways.

Look into some of the ideas of dyslexia and of learning by visualisation.

Good luck,

Stuart

    It's interesting to speculate, but it probably doesn't matter for
    your purposes, Karen.  A good deal of the research into teaching
    people with dyslexia is useful for any student who doesn't fit the
    standard mold, so the references Gerald and Stuart pointed to
    would probably be helpful. 
    
    But you don't want to jump to conclusions or get caught up in
    diagnosis that even the experts don't agree on.  (For myself, for
    instance, a team of three experts came to a split decision: one
    said I'm dyslexic, one said no, one said she couldn't make up her
    mind.)  
    
    Some people handle the concrete a lot better than the abstract
    without having any kind of learning disability; that's an example
    of the mismatch between learning style and school teaching style
    that someone else (Gerald, I think) mentioned in an earlier note. 
    
    A lot of perfectly normal people can't handle phonics, can't
    understand phonics, or are simply bored by phonics.  Perhaps she
    doesn't distinguish the sounds because she has chronic ear
    trouble, or swollen adenoids blocking her ear canal, or . . . 
    It's possible she can subtract 20 cents from 50 cents because
    she's had more practice with that than with regular math. 
    
    My guess is that you'll do her the most good if you let her take
    the lead and teach her what she wants to learn, trying to make it
    as positive an experience for her as you can.  No matter what the
    source of her problems, her self-esteem has to have taken a
    beating, and as Stuart pointed out, that hinders anyone's ability
    to learn.  If her self-esteem is up, she'll be able to deal with
    her own problems and learn how to learn despite whatever handicaps
    of life or situation have gotten her into this situation.
    
    --bonnie

Bonnie is correct in that whether you have a label or not doesn't really
matter interms of your tutoring, although it could help the school (if
it is really willing to help her ... and therein is a whole differrent
topic!).  It is useful however to know of the types of guidance used
by teachers of dyslexics to discover what gets through the best.

The scope of what we call dyslexia also varies between different psychologists
and so called experts.  Some would call problem x a learning disability of
some sort or another, and others would include it in the scope of dyslexia.
To many dyslexia simply is the reversal of symbols like 1324 or acbd.

Let's face it anyone who has difficulty learning using the current standard
(and fashionable) methods for teaching can be called learning disabled as
long as most of the children can assimilate information that way, no matter
how good or bad the teaching method!

So, I think it's a matter of finding out how the child learns and then
doing it that way so as to make her feel like she is learning successfully.
You probably won't be able to sstretch the truth and say she's doing ok if
*she* feels she isn't, even if you are pleased with her progress. She has
to feel it too.

Stuart

    My perception of my own (possible) dyslexia or whatever it is is
    that it's a difficulty in timing.  I glance at something, and it
    seems like pieces of it don't all come through at the same time. 
    It seems like, for instance, that if I'm looking at a word, say
    "quilt," that some of the letters come through faster than others,
    so I can't tell exactly how it fits together.  Sometimes this
    makes letters change places, and sometimes it makes the overall
    shape of the word look like a different word, like "guilt" or
    "quirt".  Mostly it just makes it kind of dance around.  I have to
    stop, look closely, and slow down until I can make out what the
    shape really is.  When I'm tired, this can be very difficult. 
    
    I don't know if dealing with this problem has made me careful and
    detailed, or if because I'm careful and pay attention to detail, I
    was able to overcome the dancing around.  
    
    And while you're waiting for the thing to stop dancing, the
    teacher is saying, "Aren't you paying attention?"  I wonder
    sometimes what would have happened to me if I hadn't already been
    a very good reader when I got into the school system. 
    
    My mother tells me I learned to read by reading aloud.  I'd sit
    and read to her or to my little brother.  I think this helped
    because when you're reading aloud, you have to slow down.  My
    perception of what it does is that it forces me to the speed of
    the slowest-moving part of my perception system.  Now I can read
    fast, but I still sound out the words in my mind.  
    
    I have the reverse problem of Stuart's brother -- I can deal with
    the abstract, but I have big trouble in the concrete.  I can't
    make change -- and if you think that's not embarrassing to sit
    here with a professional job and an MA in literature and avoid
    helping out at the PTO bake sale because you know you'll get
    confused if somebody hands you $2 for a $1.80 purchase . . .
    But really it's the same problem.  It's connecting two pieces of
    knowledge that aren't already connected.  
    
    I don't know if any of this is going to have any bearing on your
    student, Karen, but maybe it will give you a little background or
    context of things to watch out for or areas to look into depending
    on your interaction with this particular student.
    
    --bonnie

    I'm sorry for taking so long to respond. Thank you all for replying.

    My ultimate goal is to make sure she can contribute to and take part 
    in this society.  In order to do that she must be able to read well,
    write well, and calculate well. She doesn't have to become a nuclear 
    scientist but I can't imagine taking part in this culture without being
    able to read, write and count. 

    I am not going to steer her away from a school system which may or 
    may not be inadequate for any child to learn.  I hope to supplement her
    regular schooling. 

    I'm a bit hesitant to visit her school though. I don't want to risk
    alienating her mother. I spoke with one of her teachers on the phone.
    The teacher said that the child is very behind.  She suggested that the
    most important thing I might be able to do is to be there for the child
    and just give her my undivided attention. The teacher seems to feel
    that the attention might be just what the child needs to get moving in
    the right direction. 

    I don't know if she has been tested for any learning disabilities.  How
    do I make the suggestion without undermining her already almost 
    nonexistent confidence? If the methods used in teaching dyslexics are
    just as useful in teaching non-dyslexics, then I'll use those methods
    to cover all of the bases. :-) 

    To bring you up todate with my relationship with her, I met with her
    again recently.  She seems to look forward to our meetings and almost
    can't wait to do homework with me.  I asked her to read aloud to her
    brother (he is younger than she) over the holidays.  She agreed to make
    that her project until she and I meet again.

    In the meanwhile, I try to mix listening to her talk about life with 
    homework.  She seems to enjoy the mixture.  Maybe her teacher is right;
    maybe the my most important contribution is my und[Bivided attention.

    Thank you so much for your suggestions.

    _karen 
    
    ps Bonnie (Randall) may I please borrow the book?  She leaves off the s
    on  words just as you suspected. 
    

    Karen,
    
    Sure, you can borrow the book.  I'll dig it out of my bookshelves
    tonight.  Send me mail so we can arrange the transfer.  
    
    --bonnie

    
    As far as how to approach the subject of testing...
    
    I'm not sure of your relationship with the mother. However, the mother
    or the teacher would have to get the ball rolling. I would suggest you
    document the problems you see for a while and then discuss them with 
    the teacher. In stead of openly suggesting testing immediately I'ld
    probably ask whether the teacher had noticed this or noticed that. Then
    I'ld say I wonder if anybody had ever checked into whether or not 
    this child might be X. In other words, try to lead the teacher into
    making the step you want them to without implying that the teacher
    should have recognized these things before.