Danny Reading

 

Not Danny – but somewhat similar… (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you may remember Danny – he of the decimals and so forth.  He’s an after-school tutoring student of mine.  Coming up for twelve, still with speech difficulties and, shall we say, selective about what he gives his attention to…

I no longer teach him maths.  Reading has become the priority for our one hour a week together, since – he tells me – he is a ‘7.2’.  I’ve no idea what a 7.2 is, although I have a nasty suspicion that it could be his reading age, as tested by the special needs department.

To begin with, the reading books supplied by school looked promising – clean, attractively covered and illustrated and with easy words but age-appropriate content.  Week by week he unwillingly stumbled his way through them (“Have we DOT to do dis?”).  There was no discernible improvement.

Then the books changed.  Suddenly I was being presented with slim volumes of scantily worded and colourfully illustrated tales of ‘Ned the Greedy Dragon’, ‘Timmy the Flying Goat’ and their ilk.

“Seriously, Danny?” I remonstrated as yet another infant picture reader was dumped on the table.  “The school gave you this as your reading book?”

“I doze it myself,” he smirked conspiratorially, “I doze it ‘tos its easy!”

There followed a short but pointed lecture from me on the short-sightedness of this strategy and the difficulties that would accrue should he – as seemed more than possible – leave school without basic reading skills.

I didn’t feel I was getting through.
Danny, after all, has had seven long years to perfect his reading-avoidance strategies.  He wears them with pride.

Fortunately I know Danny well.  As I’ve discovered through our years together, motivation is everything with him.  A memory was stirring somewhere in my mind.  I recalled beginning to write a simplified version of Life: A Player’s Guide aimed at 9-12 year olds.  A short rummage around my PC’s hard drive revealed it: Coran and the Cosmic Computer Game.

Would this story of avatar creation and computer coding in a sci-fi location be of interest to Danny?  I strongly suspected that it would.  I was also confident that he would be able to grasp – and relish – the analogy being drawn to Life.  Would the words be beyond his reading skills?  Well they were quite a way ahead of Timmy the Goat et al.  On the other had, if he were sufficiently motivated…

It was certainly worth a try.
First I drew up a grid, so that polysyllabic words could be written out, broken down into their constituent phonemes and blends.  (See right.)  Then I printed page 1 of the story:

 

Coran and the Cosmic Computer Game

 A brand new game! Coran was grinning to himself so much that he kept almost bursting into giggles. This was exciting. In fact it was more than exciting.

 He collected his pass and headed for the programming suite. That was where he would meet the programmer who would help him build his avatar and enter The Game.

He looked at the pass. It said he needed to go to Station 4. He headed across to the terminal and was greeted by a tall figure who sat the keyboard.

 “So, it’s nearly your birth-day, Coran,” said the Tall One, with a nod of his head.   “About time for you to do some choosing.”

“Hmm,” said Coran, thinking hard.

 Up where Coran lives, birth-days are not the same as birthdays here. A birth-day there means exactly what it says – the day you will be born!  Now that may seem odd to you, because Coran is already alive, or he couldn’t be saying, “Hmm,” – could he?

 What it means is that Coran is about to be born as a new character in a cosmic computer game. First he needs to select his avatar, which involves making loads of choices, then he will be ready to start playing The Game.

 Coran was trying to decide what sort of character he wanted to be in this game. He’d played it many times before, but this game was so mind-blowingly huge that each attempt could be completely different from all the ones before.

 “Nothing too easy,” he told the Tall One. “I want a real challenge this time. The last game was utterly boring.”

The Tall One smiled to himself and began to type the code on his machine.

“So you want a big challenge, huh?”

 “Definitely,” announced Coran. “My character will  have…”

The title was slow going.  By the end of the second sentence, though, he was reading most words without asking me to lay them out for him on the phoneme grid.  By the end he was barely stumbling on anything.  There were about three words in the whole passage I had to read for him.
He regarded me with wide eyes as he finished.  “I dort it was doin’ to tate me about a hour to read dat,” he said.
“Me too,” I admitted, and we both smiled broadly.
“Dan I read the next bit next time?” he asked.

As I mentioned, with Danny, motivation is everything.  I strongly suspect this is also true of so many of the so-called disaffected or learning-disabled students languishing in our schools.

 

A Raw Nerve

 

Wasn’t intending at all to write about this today, but here goes…

It’s not my normal style, and I’m not posting this story to gain pity or settle old scores, merely to show that once any system is ruled by fear, it is ruined.  In my very long career in the education system, I watched that happen, and it has continued apace since I left six and a half years ago.

I was just told by a friend on Facebook of a horrible incident from her childhood.  She’d been in an excellent school where all the children were learning well and very happy, yet a sour, vindictive school inspector came in, found the one child with mild learning difficulties, reduced him to jelly and verbally trashed the teacher, who went home and committed suicide.

Inspectors – like all manner of ‘experts’ – are people who swan into a setting for about 20 minutes and believe they have the knowledge and ability to sum the situation up and make life-changing judgements.

They don’t.

Let me tell you my inspector story – mild by comparison, but the raw nerve that was touched by my friend’s memory.

I posted once about a very special and experimental class I taught. The link to the original post is here.  The children were in a mainstream school but between them they had a huge range of problems and life circumstances which would reduce almost anyone to a gibbering mess.  Several had been on the brink of permanent exclusion because their behaviour was so extreme.

Well they made massive progress, and the following year I returned to teaching a ‘normal’ class of 10 and 11 year olds – except that this normal class contained a large proportion of the children I’d been working with the year before.

There was Shaun whose dad had died a year or two back after years of alcoholism, Daniel whose dad had just come out of prison and was now back to running a crack house, Isla who had just been moved from her long-term foster-carers and was being rehoused almost every week, Carly whose dad had terminal cancer, Sam who had suffered severe physical and emotional abuse at the hands of a teenage brother and various step parents… and those are just the ones that spring to mind.

By and large, we got along just fine.  Plenty of learning took place and although I often had to make allowances for these damaged and traumatised kids, who had a shorter fuse than most, with help from my brilliant learning support team, I was able to achieve my targets and they were making progress – in the ways our leaders required, as well as socially and emotionally (which to me was far more important).

Then we discovered that we were to be inspected by an OFSTED team.

An urgent class discussion took place.
“We really need to show these people how far you’ve come,” I told them. “That means while they’re here, it would really help if you could stay in your chairs, not have any arguments with each other or freak out if you feel a bit challenged.  I promise I’ll support you all and it won’t last long.”

Shaun gave an agonised scream.  “Can’t do it Miss,” he bellowed.  “I know I’ll get stressed out just ‘cos they’re here and then I’ll lose it big time and you’ll get in trouble.  I can’t handle it!”

That started an avalanche of worries and tears.  In each case it was the same.  They were terrified that they would let me, the class and the school down.  Day to day living was enough of a challenge for many of them.  This was a step too far.

My wonderful teaching assistants and I reassured them, praised them, reminded them how far they’d come and declared our absolute confidence that they could manage this.

The inspector arrived.  A roundish, well-heeled lady with a posh accent.  As she walked in, the children were immersed in the activity I’d set.  All was calm; all were bright.  True, Sam waited for the first opportunity when her gaze was averted and crawled under his table, where he remained trembling but otherwise immobile for the rest of the lesson, but this went quite unnoticed and no one showed any inclination to draw it to her attention.  The kids covered for him beautifully and kept him well concealed.

Children answered her questions politely and participated with enthusiasm and exemplary behaviour.

The blanket and pillow in the reading corner that doubled as a bed for anyone who hadn’t been able to sleep the night before.

When she’d left, we dusted Sam down and told the children how proud we were of them and how wonderfully they had behaved.  I was bursting with pride when I headed off to lunch that day.

After school, though, I had my feedback session with the inspector.

“Come in dear,” she smiled.  “Yes, a perfectly adequate lesson.  No problems and I could see learning taking place.  But…”  she looked slightly reproachful,  “I mean they’re a very well-behaved, good natured class, aren’t they dear?  I do feel you could have pushed them a bit harder – given them more challenge.”

There was the briefest of pauses where I could have responded.  I considered it.  I think the reason I didn’t was the same as Sam’s or Shaun’s.  The fear and stress and anxiety had been so overwhelming that I didn’t trust myself to say a word, for fear of letting the school, the class and everyone down.  If she believed that my class were well-behaved, then that was all I needed.  Yet I’d be lying if I said that her pronouncement on my lesson – ‘average’ – didn’t sting.

I feel no animosity towards the posh inspector.  She was simply doing her job.  Was she adequate?  Who am I to say?

The next day I told the class how impressed she’d been with their work and behaviour.  That was all they needed to know.  And I began planning my exit from the English state education system.

 

Pavlov’s Danny

Regular readers of this blog may already be familiar with Danny, a ten year old boy I tutor in maths.  You may recall how, by the  judicious use of a few mini pizzas, Danny was finally able to work with decimals without hyperventilating at the very mention of them.

This week it was time to do some revision and to move him further in his studies.

By now, I reasoned (correctly, as it turned out) Danny should be able to work with printed pictures of pizza.  He had reached a stage where the pictures alone had him salivating as effectively as Mr Pavlov’s little bell did for his canine subjects.

We had images of  stacks of ten pizza delivery boxes to represent tens, whole pizza images to represent units and tenths and hundredths cut from a spare one of these.  As long as there was something to remind him of the pizza experience, Danny was able to pick up or identify 31.34 pizzas.  Even 20.25, 1.72 and 3.06 were well within his grasp.

From here we moved to an image of three boys eating pizza in front of the TV.  I had written down how much pizza each had consumed and asked Danny to rank them in order of  who had eaten the most.  He poured over the numbers with the most intense concentration.

“Tim dot the least,” he announced, “‘Tos he only dot 1.23 pizzas.  Then it’s Ed, ‘tos he had 3.6 and – oh I wish I was Sam! He’s dot 23.6 pizzas!”

We tried several similar questions.  He didn’t make a single mistake.  For Danny, motivation is everything.  Numbers don’t motivate him.  In fact they often terrify him.  Pizzas, however, are benign and desirable.  It’s important, in Danny’s mind, to know who has the most.  He comes from a large family.  To him, this is a survival skill.

Half way down the sheet, he noticed that the questions changed.  No comforting tales of pizza-snacking friends – just a request to order a set of 5 decimal numbers from smallest to largest.  The kind of question he’ll be asked to do battle with in the SATs tests in a few short weeks.

He glanced at me in panic.

“What’s these?” he asked.

“They’re still decimals, Danny,” I reassured him.  “Just think of them like pizzas.  Every time you see decimals, just think pizza, OK?”

“Right,” he said, relaxing instantly.

To my amazement and delight, he continued to order the numbers correctly.  I showered him with praise as he sorted out this group:    14.8             18.4             41.8             4.18             81.4.

“You know we’re doing these sums at sdool at the moment,”  he said thoughtfully, as he munched on the chocolate biscuit I’d given him as a reward.  “And I’m no dood at it.”

“Do you think you might do better tomorrow if you think of them as pizzas?” I wondered.

“Yes, I’m sure I tould do it then,” he smiled.

When he left, I sat down to prepare next week’s lesson.  It would be yet another attempt to encourage him to learn his multiplication bonds.  ‘If only,’ I mused, ‘I could find a way of motivating him to do that.’

Well, it’s far from perfect, but maybe this will help…

 

Related articles

• Danny and the Decimals

A Child with autistic spectrum perception in a neuro-typical school – help, please

EXPERT (Photo credit: Pete Prodoehl)

It’s no coincidence, of course, that within a week, two people had asked me questions about children with autistic spectrum perception coping in mainstream schools. It was clearly something I needed to give attention to.

The first was a parent, asking my opinion about her daughter, a ten-year-old I see for a couple of hours a week.

This thoughtful, caring and highly intuitive mum was at her wit’s end, as another ‘expert’, who had spent all of twenty minutes assessing her child, sat her down and talked at her about the girl’s needs, beginning with, “Is there anything in particular that you wanted to say, or are you happy just to let me explain my findings?  I’m afraid we don’t have very long.”

The implication – that 20 minutes of advice from an expert was more relevant and worthy of discussion than ten years of maternal care and understanding –  was not lost on the parent.  She bit her tongue, listened as the standard strategies and suggestions were trotted out, and silently despaired.  I’ve seen this happen to families more times than I can count.

Hot on the heels of this was an enquiry from a friend who is working in a school where a young teacher is trying to balance the needs of a class of lively six-year-olds and one little boy on the autistic spectrum.  He’s yet to be ‘seen’ by the expert, but the teacher is in need of strategies and ideas to help him cope within the classroom – preferably in such a way that his screaming fits and throwing of anything he can lay his hands on can be reduced.

Forest School

I’ve never met this child, and was told only that he enjoyed the class forest school sessions, loved nature and since his personal teaching assistant had left was being given round the clock one-to-one attention by a wide range of staff – including teachers giving up their lunch hours – to ensure that he was always supervised.  My friend also mentioned that he’d had to be dragged, kicking and screaming to school that Monday.

And this is where the help comes in.

Yes, I came up with a few thoughts, off the top of my head, which I’ll copy below.  I have a fair bit of personal experience and have read many books on the subject, but would never call myself an expert.   That title I’d reserve for the parents and the people on the spectrum who have lived with this amazing, different and non-typical way of being on a daily basis, year after year.

If any of you reading this and can add further insights and suggestions (bearing in mind, of course, the needs of the rest of the children in the class), please comment and add your ideas.  I promise they’ll be passed on.

Here – for what they’re worth, are the thoughts I had, in no particular order:

Familiarity, to a child on the spectrum, is like a life raft in a sea of change, so the current situation with constantly changing minders is the worst possible for him.  Given that presumably nothing can be done about that, he needs as many things as possible to stay the same – either the room he’s cared for in, or a folder/box of his own equipment or activities (preferably his favourite colour and/or texture – he’s bound to have very strong preferences – but failing that, a Thomas the Tank Engine cover almost always works!)

If he doesn’t already have one, a visual timetable will help him to make some sense of his days, as long as every adult works through it with him at every change in his day.  It needs to be geared to his particular circumstances.

Cash in on his affinity with nature in every way possible – a feely box with bark, leaves, moss etc. to touch and talk about; a set of twigs or pebbles to count, sort or order in various ways; picture books about the natural world to share and perhaps a bird feeder outside the window, which he could fill and watch.  

I’ve noticed that these kids often have a link to crystals.  It would be worth seeing if a small bag of tumbled stones can be used to calm him when he’s out of control.  A lad I taught used to tell me that he could feel certain crystals vibrating in his hand.  He had a particular stone that always helped him to feel calmer if something had upset him.

Check with Mum whether there’s a particular object/texture/picture/sound that calms him at home.  Maybe school could have something similar to offer when he’s at the throwing stage.  

Perhaps a peaceful sunset or polar poster could be put at his eye level for him to lose himself in.

I’d strongly suggest that staff don’t discourage flapping, rocking or repetitive actions.  These may not be neuro-typical behaviours, but they are exactly what these children need to get themselves back under control.  Screaming and headbanging are less easy to deal with, but cushions help in both cases – to smother the noise (though not the child, of course!) and to protect the head.

The apparently unprovoked Monday morning tantrum could have been a response to the change from the weekend routine or a complaint about the chaos of having this many-carers system at school, but children on the spectrum are invariably very sensitive to the moods and feelings of others – to the point of telepathy, so he could easily be acting out some tension he has sensed in the household.

If outdoors works for him, get him outdoors!  I know from bitter experience teaching on the east coast, with winds straight from Siberia, how unpleasant that might be for his minder, but it may help him to gain control of himself.    

I presume someone has checked whether strip lighting affects him?  Some hypersensitive kids get an unbearable strobing effect from them.  They can also be strongly affected by smells, sounds, textures and the pattern of light and shadow, which the rest of us would barely notice.  So get all his carers to avoid perfume, for example.  Again, his mum could probably advise you.

I realise these are only a few ‘first aid’ measures, and don’t even scratch the surface of the deeper needs of a person who perceives in this way.  

Maybe they’ll help slightly.  Maybe you have something to add…

Why some children don’t get numbers

This post is strictly for educators and parents with children who hate maths.  No esoteric stuff this time…

When I was a teacher, for some reason I always used to be given the top set for maths – year after year.  (I’m not going to get into the ‘Is streaming children for maths a good idea?’ debate, by the way; just saying that’s the way it was.)

Well I enjoyed working with the school’s brightest and best very much, but then one year, the head teacher told me he’d like me to work with the lowest set.  That got me really excited!

I always loved a challenge.  I spent most of the summer holidays pouring through the finished maths books of my new group, trying to work out why a bunch of hard-working and well-intentioned 10 and 11 year olds had apparently failed to understand the very basics of number, while their classmates had made such excellent progress.

Finally, I had it.  There was one simple step that this group of youngsters had somehow missed – and this was the key that would help them to understand.  It goes something like this:

In English, we have 26 letters:         a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z       which we use to make words.

The words can be one or more letters long:        a  my  box  daft  every  garden  quickly  unlikely  difficult…

In maths, we have 9 digits:        1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  and one gap-filler  0               which we use to make numbers.

The numbers can be one or more digits long:                 3    27    154    2013    53196   100481…

So how was I to get that message across to a bunch of kids who by now were approaching some kind of number phobia? They were happy to work with numbers up to about 20.  From 40 onwards they got somewhat panicky, and if a teacher tried to introduce three- or four-digit numbers, they’d start shaking and ask to go to the toilet.

My solution was to give each child an abacus.  The ones in educational catalogues were hugely expensive, coloured to appeal to 3 year olds and far too big to fit on their tables.  I paced around the local shopping centre for a while and ended up with a couple of packs of self-hardening clay, a bargain tub of those little fusible plastic beads and a stiff yard broom.  The bristles made sturdy but flexible and non-dangerous abacus sticks.  I set four of them into a little strip of clay and cut them off at exactly the height of 9 beads.  That way, the children would be able to make the numbers 1 to 9 on the ‘unit’ stick, but would be forced to take them off and start again on the ‘tens’ stick when they wanted to show the number 10.

These are my updated versions – note boy- and girl-friendly versions to help children feel relaxed around numbers.

The picture shows how I now make them for individual students, using a loop of wire, with beads safely trapped into the abacus.  There are, of course, only 9 beads on each wire.

We spent many days ‘building’ numbers from 1 to 99 on the abacuses and writing down the equivalent number.  Suddenly the 4 in 46 was understood as ‘four tens’ and the purpose of the zero in 20 was clear.

I insisted that they were forbidden to use the other two sticks, until they were completely begging me to allow them to make ‘hundreds numbers’.
“Nah,” I grinned.  “You don’t like big numbers, remember?”
“We do!” they insisted.  “We can manage it,  We promise.  It’ll be easy!”
“Well, if you’re sure…” I said, looking suitably doubtful and working hard to suppress a triumphant grin.

Within weeks, these children were working confidently with three- and four-digit numbers; not just building and writing them, but using them in calculations.

The next stage was to turn the abacuses round and use them to show decimals. Instead of labelling our four sticks as Thousands, Hundreds, Tens and Units, we now had Units, Tenths, Hundredths and Thousandths.  There was a clear decimal point marked between the whole numbers and the decimals and I showed them how, in this looking-glass world, zeros had to be used as gap-markers from the left, not the right.  Otherwise, they were in familiar territory.

By the end of term, the class was happily creating numbers to four decimal places, and comments like, “I get maths now!” and even, “Actually, I LIKE maths!” were heard around the room.

Now, to my great delight, I’ve been asked to work with Simeon: 14 years old, great at English, clueless at numbers.  Here we go again!

The Curse of the Question Mark

Danny, despite his speech difficulties, has an interesting turn of phrase.  He’s just 10, and yesterday we had our first tutoring session of the new school year together.

“So what’s been going on in your life over the summer?” I asked.
“Dood stuff!” he announced, proudly. “I had my birthday, and I dot a digital damera and I’m detting a laptop soon!”

He must have noticed my raised eyebrows. I know his family’s financial situation isn’t great.
“The laptop’s from a jarity,” he explained. “I don’t know what ‘slexia is, but my mum wrote to them and they’re divving me a laptop so I can do my homewort.”
“Well that’s brilliant, Danny,” I enthused.  “Aren’t you a lucky boy!”

Lucky isn’t really the word that springs to mind when you first come across Danny.  The youngest in his year group, he does daily battle with all aspects of academic study at school.  Words appear to fly around the page and refuse to lodge in his memory; numbers resist all attempts to become bonded or otherwise related to one another.  Several speech sounds remain stubbornly inaccessible to him, despite years of therapy, and his tendency to writhe, fiddle, daydream or mumble his way through the interminable school day must have driven many a teacher to distraction.

Despite all this, Danny remains a cheerful child with a gift for optimism and humour.  He’s one of the many special young people who have so much to share with those of us who are willing to embrace different ways of learning and being.

“Do you really not know what dyslexia is, Danny?” I asked, despite my personal aversion to the term.  “Would you like me to explain it to you?”

‘Explain’ is one of his trigger words.  I should have remembered.

“No,” he replied hastily, “I thint I remember now.  It means I darn’t learn properly.”

Well that set off one of my own triggers!  I drew a quick cartoon brain.  I drew two dots and a straight line representing stimulus and response between two points in a neurotypical brain.  Then I drew the response to a stimulus in his brain – all manner of weird and wonderful connections firing off simultaneously and the resulting wavy synaptic line that connected them all in new and exciting ways.

“You learn DIFFERENTLY Dan,” I told him, as I traced the routes on my drawing with my finger, “and if the teacher wants a quick answer, that’s difficult for you.  On the other hand, if she wants an original answer – one that no one else would think of – then yours is the perfect brain for that.”

He looked slightly hopeful but sceptical.

“What are you like at computer games?” I asked.
“Brilliant!” he grinned. “I’m the best in the family. I tan beat everyone.”

Several minutes of sound-effect laden role play followed as he demonstrated his prowess at Mario with an imaginary DS.

“I’m not surprised,” I told him.  “Your brain is perfect for that.  It can keep track of all the different things going on at once – the number of lives and energy levels, the route you need to take, dangerous enemies and obstacles…  All those bits of your brain that work at once can handle that far better than most ordinary people.”

Danny seemed happy with that, so we turned to some of the work I’d prepared – the gentlest of introductions to algebra, such as

9 + ? = 13   or  15 – ? = 10

Danny stared balefully at the page for a moment, then rose in his seat, peering down at it with great disdain.

“Dwestion Marts!” he announced with gravitas.  “My arch enemy!  I hate you, Dwestion Marts!  You never reveal what you are hiding!  Durse you to hell forever!”

And that’s the way it goes – a typical weekly session with Danny, the boy who can’t perhaps answer the question, but has penetrated to the heart of its intrinsic essence with a clarity the rest of us can only gasp at.

How utterly dull our world would be without the likes of Danny.