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]

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.