Writing Vomit #4-Love Hurts

I have bruises on my arms. It's fine. I didn't even realize my arms were bruised until about 15 hours later and found the marks and/or bumped my arm where a bruise happened to be. I work with kids with emotional and behavioral disorders. It is expected in my job that kids will act out. The truth is that kids with emotional and/or behavioral disorders often act out for reasons they cannot control.

My 2 younger kids have learning disorders that are often misinterpreted or belittled. A learning disability does not necessarily mean that a kid is "just being lazy" when they seem unable to complete work. Work avoidance is definitely a concern, but telling a dysgraphic kid that they just need to try harder is like telling a blind kid to try harder to see. Handwriting is replaced with keyboarding or pictures as much as possible. 5 years after the diagnosis for my son and we still fight for accommodations. Dysgraphia affects more than just handwriting. Here's a link that describes dysgraphia in more detail if you are interested in learning about it. Understanding Dysgraphia

Kids with brain disorders that cause them to act aggressively and/or other anti-social behaviors are often born into environments that are not conducive to brain development. Though it should also be noted that poor physical health can also contribute to a lack of proper brain growth.

Case in point on the latter issue is my son again. He suffered from several ear infections as an infant. His health wasn't as bad as many children, but it was enough of an issue that he didn't crawl until after ear tube surgery at 10 months. His brain couldn't concentrate on learning to move until he felt better. The same is true if any basic need is not being met. A child's brain won't develop if basic needs are not met.

I think that many kids with these extreme behavior disorders especially lacked at least one if not more basic needs in utereo, during the birth process, as an infant, or as a toddler. Damage during these formative months and years can cause a child's development to derail. But even if a child passes these years unscathed, trauma later in life can cause irreverable damage.

It is disheartening to see how some of these kids are treated by the adults that claim to care for them. I've been asked several times by adults at my school why we "let" these kids be there. What if it were your child? What if something happened that was beyond your control and your child is the one that has special needs? What if you opened your home to a child who had a less-than desirable infanthood? Do they deserve a chance? Multiple chances?

That is a question I struggle with often. It is hard to see full-time mainstreamed kids have to deal with kids that can't handle a regular classroom. It's hard to see them have to be evacuated from a classroom for safety. It's also hard to see kids in crisis. Kids that deserved and now also deserve better.

The kids I work with want and deserve love. Some crave contact, others avoid it at all costs. Each child is valuable, and loveable. Those of us who work with them value them, and they (for the most part) see that. We are their safe place.

Everyone deserves a safe place.

My Boy Has A Lot Of Promise

My son started 5th grade 2 weeks ago. He goes to a school that has a short 6-week summer break and starts the next grade at the end of July. School is then in session for 9 weeks, followed by 3 weeks of break. We love the schedule for the most part. It's difficult in some ways now that my oldest child is in middle school and is on a traditional school calendar, but we wish that she was on the modified calendar still!

K Man has been diagnosed with dysgraphia, fine motor skill delay and short-term memory impairment. We have taken him for testing twice since 2nd grade. He tests with a high average IQ which, in Minnesota, disqualifies him for an IEP, but he still is able to have a 504 plan. (Don't know what they are? Please Google!)

We are very fortunate to have a principal that is willing to go the extra mile for the kids in his school, so he found a loophole to get K Man OT to improve his handwriting (it is better, but still hard to read) and extra help to develop his general writing skills. He's also received help with reading since 2nd grade.

The school uses a color system to level the kids for their reading skills. K Man was below grade level all of last year. Just today K Man almost tested at grade level. He was 2 vocab words away from testing AT GRADE LEVEL. This is HUGE for him and I am so proud of him. He has come a long way since 2nd grade.

I know the kid is brilliant in perhaps, non-conventional ways. He will find a niche and blow it out of the water. He continues to surprise and perplex me. I'm sure I'll never understand how his mind works. I'm excited to see his future endeavors.

Then He Started Reading Voluntarily

Before K Man started Kindergarten, he loved having my husband or I read to him. His favorite book by far was Green Eggs and Ham. There was a time that I pretty much had that book memorized, and you know it is something like 65 pages long...just a few words on each page...but still, sixty-five pages of a children's book. We could never read it just once either. It had to be at least twice.

I will not eat them on a train or in a house or in the rain. Or something like that. These days, getting K Man to read is a lot like being Sam I Am trying to convince him to try green eggs and ham. Since starting Kindergarten four years ago, when he was required to start to learn to read himself, he has become much less fond of reading. He seldom even asked us to read to him.

I probably should have seen the flags right away. It's strange for a child who loves books so much to suddenly recoil at the thought of them. But no, I just thought he was too active to sit long enough for a book. I thought it was normal letter-reversals. I remember asking everyone if it was weird that he still confused b's and d's and 2's and 5's and several other letters and numbers even when he was near the end of 1st grade. Everyone said it was still normal, but something still was tugging at my mind. It didn't seem right. So, we had him tested before the start of second grade.

Now here we sit, a little more than one year later. He is making progress in some areas and not in others. Spelling is still a nightmare. His reading, however, continues to improve.

Last weekend, he received his Bible from our church. (All third graders receive either a children's Bible or a traditional Bible from our church.) I chose the traditional Bible for K Man, even with his reading difficulties. He was proud to receive it, I could tell.

Then he started reading it, voluntarily. I'm not sure if you know this, but the Bible is not exactly easy reading, especially for a kid who has difficulties with reading. I asked him about the book and he told me he read about "this lady who wasn't supposed to eat some fruit but she did..."

A see a glimmer of hope.

We Learn to Deal With Learning Disability

 K Man's official medical diagnosis is a "disorder of written expression" (which is also called dysgraphia) and ADD NOS (though I disagree with this assessment since it was made before his dysgraphia diagnosis.)  We obtained the diagnosis a little more than a year ago and floundered all last year about what to do with the information.

This year, the school is taking things more seriously. (It was an unusual year the last part of the school year last year and we wondered if some of the issues were related to family crises such as losing an uncle at a young age and a grandfather having a life-threatening illness.)

We've met and drafted a 504 plan. Thus far, the principal and the district psychologist do not think he qualifies for an Individualized Education Plan (IEP), mostly because his IQ scores during his testing were high. So, we know he is intelligent (which, if you know him, is quite obvious.) but his school testing is consistently below grade level in reading fluency (though not comprehension), writing and especially spelling. Spelling in particular is a nightmare. He has fewer words to study (an accommodation we put in place last year) but still spells only 1-3 words correctly on a given test. Occasionally, there is an anomaly and he'll get 12 correct even when he's only supposed to study 10. (This has only happened twice.)

Under his 504, he will be tested away from the majority of his class in small group settings or just him with a paraprofessional. He expressed great relief when he heard of this because he said "Oh good! Now I don't have to hear the kids sharpen their pencils." It should be noted that he's been known to sharpen his pencil several times during the day, but if he thinks this will help, so be it. He will have non-reading and non-spelling related tests read to him so we can test his knowledge in each subject without bringing his disability into the mix.

There are other accommodations as well.

After I asked some questions, he told me recently that it physically hurts him to write for any length of time. I can't imagine what that is like, especially when everyone is asking you to write all the time. He pointed to the area beneath and around and his thumb and said his wrist also causes him pain. For someone like me, who loves to write and loves the feel of a great pen or pencil on paper, this is disheartening to hear. He'll never love writing like I do.

He consistently reverses letters and numbers even now in 3rd grade. Bs and Ds are especially difficult still, as well as 2s and 5s. He's been taking his spelling tests on the computer for a while now. When he reads he skips words, skips entire lines, adds words and sometimes simply guesses on what he thinks the sentence will be. His fluency has improved since the end of July (when my bigs started school) but it is still below grade level.

I wish there were some magical solution to make his brain work like most everyone else's, but I suspect that he wouldn't be the unique kid that he is if that were the case. The challenge is to teach his differently-wired brain to learn the things he needs to succeed in life. Our journey is just beginning and I worry daily. I don't ever want to have a regret I didn't help him enough.