Got Eva's last three spelling tests back.

[conuly]

90, 60, 40. On some of them, I can't tell which words she was trying to write. And I just don't understand how she can get them right with me every day from Monday through Thursday, and then get them wrong on the test.

I'm going to make Jenn write a note, asking if Eva can be excused from most spelling homework (just Monday and Thursday, I think) so she can spend the rest of the week going back to basics doing spelling with me from the very very beginning. Also if we can get her spelling tests back on the day they're done instead of a pile at once. Do you know NYC schools don't provide specific services for dyslexia? Programs for that (and one or two schools) are all private. I ever randomly get rich and I'm doing two things, I'm opening a new middle school and I'm opening up a school for dyslexic students, either as a charter school or a private one with a very sliding scale.

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

"I just don't understand how she can get them right with me every day from Monday through Thursday, and then get them wrong on the test."

The most common reason for that is because the adult is unconsciously cueing the child - John Holt talks about that at some length.

Here's a radical suggestion for ya: how about if you don't get her excused from spelling homework, don't spend the rest of the week going "back to basics" with her, and just 'take your hands off'? See that she does the homework, of course, but don't do it with her, don't proofread it for her... just let it go. Her spelling grades will immediately drop, but they'll come back up again after a while if you don't make a fuss about it.

Spelling is not like math. With math, it does often help to go back to the basics, because the concepts of math build upon themselves logically, so a person who missed something at the beginning can't progress far. The concepts of English spelling do NOT build upon themselves logically - far from it - so a review of the principles of phonics won't improve spelling ("Huct on fonyx diddent werck four me".) If she's a fluent reader, she's already internalized the principles of phonics, and if she's not, reading aloud would help her more than doing phonics-workbook exercises.

Math is an essential life skill, and a person who can't cope with it is at a disadvantage throughout life. Spelling is not an essential life skill, and whether or not a person is good at it has more to do with talent than with skill. I was apparently *born* knowing how to spell; it never caused me the least trouble in school - and I was a rebellious, day-dreamy, highly-unmotivated, extremely anti-homework student. My brother John was a serious and motivated honor student who grew up to become a respected scientist and engineer, and he can't spell his way out of a paper bag; never could. It doesn't matter, though: he has Spellcheck.

Everybody has Spellcheck, and the ability to spell without it has become one of those old-fashioned skills that are handy to have, but no big inconvenience to not have. It's not analogous to still needing to learn multiplication even though everyone has calculators, because learning multiplication is about more than coming up with the right answer. Spelling isn't. So let it go, and Eva will either learn to spell before she's past the age of spelling lessons or she won't, but in either case, This Too Shall Pass.

*sighh* I hear ya about opening up a school. In my own case, though, it'd be an 'unschool'.

[conuly]

I don't proofread. I don't even look at the word until she's done. I read the word aloud, she writes it, and after she's done I look at it and it's generally right. I don't see how I *could* be cuing her in a blind reading like that.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Hmm, good point. Okay, alternate hypothesis: something about the way you say the word is easier for her to translate. She might have an auditory-processing glitch, so that it's hard for her to encode a spoken word (the opposite process from 'sounding out' a written one.) It's possible she compensates for that with you by lip-reading - you can test that by hiding your mouth when reading the words. It's possible the teacher's enunciation is odd or blurry, or that ambient sounds are interfering with Eva's ability to decode her speech, or that Eva naturally hears certain phonemes with more variation than most people do.

As to that, consider: living in Brooklyn, you're in the very midst of the biggest melting-pot of languages the world has ever known. Any random dozen people there may pronounce a given word a dozen different ways and yet it's still spelled the same. English orthography is complicated enough among, like, northern Californians, but in a place where everyone speaks it differently, it's got to be even harder to figure out the spelling.

[conuly]

Staten Island, not Brooklyn. And even in Brooklyn it's not so melty as all that. Each ethnicity has it's own neighborhood, reason one why NYC schools are so remarkably segregated.

But no, we do suspect an auditory processing issue. However, getting her tested is turning into a massive hassle, because the place that does the testing has, for no reason I can fathom, decided to hide its number incomprehensibly in the phone system. I'm not sure they even staff it at all.