The Intersection between School and Brain Injury Therapy

I’m almost finished with cognitive therapy. They call it speech therapy, I think, so that we’re not embarrassed about it as we negotiate with the world to get to our appointments. I’ve decided to go the direct route, not hiding that I have brain injury. What good does it do to hide that my hair doesn’t grow well? I could wear a wig, but you’d probably recognize that It’s a wig. In the same vein, what good does it do to work so hard to pretend there’s nothing wrong with my brain? No matter how hard I try, you’re still going to see my mistakes.

Last night, while watching Uncharted (I had to google the name of the movie), I said that there had to be some squashbuckling. in it because they found Magellan’s ships. I fixed it, said swashbuckling two or three times, when I realized my mistake, but it is part of my difficulty, my brain injury, recalling words. Here’s my list of difficult words so far.

There are some words I have trouble simply recalling as I speak:

• cognitive

• nursing home

• pernicious

• histoplasmosis

• cookies

• mayhem

• deadline

• navigator

• rivalry

• cadaver

• quarry hole

• swashbuckling

Oh, there are more, but those were the ones I wrote down the way I’m supposed to. Then, there’s the loss of spelling:

• medieval

• dependant

• annihilate

• dilemma

And so many more. I used to be really good at spelling.

The cool thing is that I get to start working the same way my students do to work around my shortcomings. The hard part is that I know I’m going to admit my shortcomings with my students and their parents instead of trying to hide them. Will they still want to have me tutor their children if I don’t have the levels of executive function I used to have? Maybe not. Or maybe they’ll watch me struggle alongside them and they’ll see the benefits to their children of learning that learning is a struggle worth pursuing. I guess it depends on the student and their parents.

I don’t organize as well as I used to. I forget how when I’m tired. I have trouble following directions. I have some challenge even reading when I have too much I need to read. I have lots of trouble organizing my writing projects. I have students with this difficulty so I’m going to make copies of the paperwork and workbook to teach them what I’m learning. I’m getting a headache just writing about this. It’s time to wrap up soon.

Together, my students and I are going to break large projects into smaller projects, plan how long it will take, organize our space to make it easier to concentrate, schedule tasks on a calendar, plan and implement breaks, set up people to report progress to, and celebrate the completion of our small steps as well as the large ones.

For now, I need to do this for my tutoring, plus for my writing if I’m ever going to finish another book. I really want to do both. Don’t I?

I’ll admit that it would be easy to slide into oblivion, painting in a memory care class and not worrying about the future. It would be easier to let go of my life and my dreams, but that’s not who I am, is it?

How are you going to make sure you finish what you started?

Thank you for listening, jules

Tap Dancing in My Dreams

Another bad night. Three and a half hours of sleep. Stress, anxiety, insomnia. After that, I was awake for hours, hours, staring at the television because that was the only thing I could manage to do.

Sometimes, you just have to watch TV.

But then, I felt a little bit of real sleepiness and I went back to bed and snuggled under the comforters. Yes, I sleep under two heavy comforters. I slept long enough and late enough that my stomach felt weird when I woke up. You know what I mean. I had that slept-in-the-middle-of-the-day feeling. It sucks. I also woke to vivid dreams, the ones that are so close to reality that they’re the most confusing ones you can have.

I dreamed I was in my last week at my old job. I won’t tell you the whole crazy dream. Dreams always seem so important to the person telling them, but not so much to the person listening. Don’t you hate when people try to tell you their dreams? I hate that. And yet, when I have a compelling dream, I want so desperately to tell someone. So, I’ll compromise. I’ll tell you a little bit which might actually be more annoying than when someone tells you the whole thing.

I dreamed I was trying to work the last couple of days at my old job. It was crazy. Don’t you hate when people tell your their dreams were crazy? They’re crazy because they are dreams, idiot.

So, in my dream, before I woke up, the students had split themselves into two groups, the ones who were trying to learn and the ones who ran circles around the room, screaming. They disrupted what we were trying to accomplish and I took a deep breath to figure out how to tell them to fuck off and stop bothering the other students without using those words..

Instead of being diplomatic like I should have been, I looked at the disruptors and said, “Get out! You’re fired. You have no intention of learning. You just want to keep these kids from learning too. Get out! Go!”

And I ushered them out the front door and locked it. When I turned around, I had a group of kids that actually wanted to learn from me.

That’s a little like what is happening in real life. I’m leaving the collapsing place where I used to work and bringing students along with me who I know are willing to learn. Really, the only criteria I had for choosing them was that. I could work with the ones who had trouble learning, even the ones who were diagnosed with a learning disorder. If they were willing to learn, I was willing to teach them.

I imagine that this will be the only time I will have this luxury in my life, as I end this old job where they are closing their doors and begin again with fewer students, the ones I get to choose.

I know there’s a reason for apathy in a student. I know that kids who disrupt a group of working students have a reason for disrupting it. I know these apathetic students deserve to be taught. They do. But, I’d rather work with the ones that are at least trying to learn something, anything.

My worst failure days were when I sat with a student who frittered away their time and accomplished nothing while I tap danced in front of them, when I tried everything I could to get them to look at the page in front of them and think, and I still failed because of their apathy. I swear, if it would make them try to learn, I’d wear a chicken suit and stand on my head during my tutoring sessions. The absolute worst days were when I was with one willing student and the rest of the room worked to keep us from working. I hated those days.

At Nick’s karate dojo, there was a plaque that read: Teachers can only open the door. It is the student who must walk through.

Walk through the door with me, please. I don’t want to wear a chicken suit and it’s hard to stand on my head.

Thank you for listening, jules

Ramble On

I’m tired.

When I get tired, I talk too much. Tonight, I talked to a student’s parents for too long. They were very nice, and seemed to encourage me, but didn’t they have stuff to do? Weren’t they tired too?

And in the end, the boy’s dad encouraged me to write more about my dad. I’m just tired enough that it’s tempting, but somehow I had this stuff prioritized differently in my mind and I don’t know exactly why.

My dad had an experiment on Apollos 12, 13, and 14. He was an interesting man. He may have had legacy experiments on later flights, but he died and so he was no longer around the house talking about microwaves, triangulation, or signals floating on infrared waves. I always get stuck on the fact that he had such a sad ending to his story.

But when I was nine and he talked about signals floating on infrared waves, it felt like I was looking at those crayon drawings that kids make when they’re in kindergarten. I pictured little squares and triangles bobbing up and down on a lake full of rough red water.

The whole thing was invisible, which I would have spelled ‘invzball’ but that just meant they were tiny squares and triangles on a narrow stream of wavy red water.

Can you tell I’ve been working with younger kids today? One of them kept putting his hands down his pants. What do you say to a kid that keeps putting his hands down his pants? I wanted him to go wash his hands before he picked that pencil back up. What do you say?

Nothing, I guess. I just pressed my lips together, kept my eyes on his page, and tried in vain to ignore it.

The other kindergartner I tutored was amazing at drawing so I showed him a line drawing of a panda bear and he copied it exactly, even with the little white spot in the center of each eye where the light seems to hit.

Damn!

I wrote a note to his parents that he had talent. I don’t know why my dream was that his parents would take him out of tutoring and put him in art classes, but I don’t really want to give him up. I think I’ll bring colored pencils for him next time and a cube or something geometric for him to draw.

Geometry is visual, right? There is art in math and math in art. Right?

Except that I’m supposed to be teaching him reading and writing. The funny thing is that he isn’t all that bad at reading and writing.

So, I’ll have him write comics where he can write great thought bubbles with panda bears that say, “See her run to her dog. See her pet him.”

Vocabulary words for kindergarten is so narrow.

Maybe it’s haiku, seventeen syllables, ready to throw a single image on the page.

And now you know what I sound like when I’m tired, one idea flowing uninterrupted into another, never knowing where or when to stop. It’s as if I’m a little drunk and think I’m so incredibly brilliant and I write something down that will be sage through the ages, but then in the morning, stone cold sober, I look at it and it’s cliche. Or worse, it’s something someone else said better, but I forgot that they’d said it. The best-case scenario for drunk writing was when I woke up and could not read a word of what was so brilliant the night before. I’m glad I don’t do that any more. It’s bad enough when I’m tired and will read this ramble-on in the morning.

Thank you for listening, jules