A Safe Place for Joey

I returned Mr. Stone’s steady gaze and then turned to Mrs. Stone as well. “Yes. I want to help. I’d like to work with Joey, but I can’t do it alone. I’ll need a lot of help from both of you and from Joey and his school. I’d like to talk with his teacher every week or so. It’s important to know how he’s doing in the classroom, because no matter how well he does here with me, if there isn’t carryover into his classroom it isn’t going to help Joey stay in a regular class.

“I have two things I’d like you to do. I’d like you to have a pediatric audiologist check Joey – just to cover all bases and make sure there is no physical cause for the low scores in auditory processing. Second, I’d like you to try to see that he eats well, with an emphasis on fruits and vegetables rather than sweets and junk food. I don’t think there’s a diet in the world that will teach him to read, but it may cut down the hyperactivity.

“The main thing will be to get Joey to believe in himself and take responsibility for his learning and behavior.

“I tell you what. Let me try over the summer – and also talk to the Child Study Team and see if they will agree to take another look at Joey at the end of August. If there’s been enough improvement, maybe they’ll let him start in second grade.”

We went over schedules – Joey’s and mine. School closed for summer vacation the following week, so Joey and I would both have more time. Somehow we’d have to work it out in the fall, but for now I’d see him from a quarter past nine to ten o’clock on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

Joey arrived Tuesday morning still steeped in sleep. Hair uncombed, eyes half shut, shirttail out, shoes untied. He plopped himself onto the chair behind the desk.

“Well,” he began, laying his head on the desk, “the good news is that school’s over. The bad news is that I had to get up to come here.”

“Would you rather come in the afternoon?”

“No. I got to swim in the afternoon. That’s how come we’re not going up to the lake till August. I got to be in about a hundred dozen swim meets.” 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 with paper clips, but he learned how to breathe to consciously relax his body and to live with the three breaks I allowed him each session.

By the end of July we had both learned a number of things. Joey had learned to read, although he was still below grade level, and I had learned that Joey’s disorganizational problems were not his alone. They seemed to be part of the family lifestyle. My phone messages rarely got delivered, and Joey often arrived on the wrong day or ten minutes early or not at all.

Still, we all felt encouraged. It had been a month and a half since Joey had fallen out of his chair or said he was dumb. But then again, it was summer and Joey always did well in the summer.

I sent him off on his August vacation with two books to read and a workbook I knew he could handle. We’d just have to see what happened in the fall.

The Stones came back from their vacation a week early to give Joey a chance to review with me before he was retested by the school. The Child Study Team tested him the day after Labor Day and said that while he was still “deficient,” there had been “significant improvement,” and they agreed to let Joey go on to second grade in his own school.

None of us anticipated that Joey would end up in Mrs. Madden’s class. It was nobody’s fault. The second-grade teacher Joey was slated to have became pregnant over the summer and on the first day of school decided she didn’t feel well enough to handle both her first pregnancy and a second-grade class. She opted for a year’s leave of absence. The principal, Mr. Templar, thought the new teacher he hired was too inexperienced to handle Joey, so he transferred Joey to Mrs. Madden’s class.

Mrs. Madden was certainly experienced. Thirty years of experience – most of it in the same school system. When I called her during the first week of school to tell her about Joey’s evaluation and what we had done over the summer, and to ask if I could check in with her every week or so, Mrs. Madden made it clear that conferences or phone calls with me were not necessary. She said she had discussed Joseph’s case with the Child Study Team. She understood they were giving him a trial in second grade. She assured me that she had known plenty of other children with problems and that Joseph would not cause any trouble in her class. She also said she thought she should be honest with me and tell me that in her opinion tutors were a waste of time – worse than a waste if they let the child become dependent on them. Of course, if the Stones wanted to throw their money away it was up to them.

When I called the Child Study Team to say that it appeared that I was going to have some difficulty communicating with Mrs. Madden, they said they understood, they had difficulty themselves, but that in many ways she was a very good teacher.