State Of The Onion

 I'm likely to write posts more often than I can come up with witty titles, so I might as well make the first weekly update title terrible and get it over with so "State Of The Onion".

My husband and I decided to withdraw our 13-year-old from public school December 19, 2021 but we hadn't decided exactly when would be her last day and we didn't want to talk much about it until we'd notified her school. We're basically hermits so keeping quiet wasn't hard.

Initial goals:
- Mental health
- Emotional resilience
- Sleep schedule
- Appetite
- Computer programming (because the kid wants to)
- Start a blog to publish weekly summaries of what we did (done!)
- Find something (probably a bought curriculum) to use as a framework

Stuff I've read recently:
- A delightful, meme-inspired essay comparing practical accommodations with unneeded changes. Buttering The Cat Is Bad

What we did this week:
We started transitioning to waking up with an alarm. We watched some How To ADHD together and talked about it. She read a novel for ten minutes. 
   
She might not realize that I've been closely observing her physical stress responses and carefully planning communication with her to form habits that:
- parental expectations are often low stress or no stress
- assessing and planning work can be mildly interesting
- many things are not urgent.
Specifically, I am frequently offering her foods she likes, interrupting her leisure pursuits to read her memes I think she'll like, stepping up the chore/hygiene requests she usually finds easy, and asking questions (without judging her answers) about sewing a cat bed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Science!

Image
Erlenmeyer flasks behind a wok in a kitchen cabinet I said in my last post that my kid's "understanding of concepts and facts in multiple areas of science is excellent." Already knowing nearly every fact and concept presented in our district's gifted science classes made those classes boring. The lack of intellectual stimulation meant there was no "hook" to make graphing or writing engaging. When people talk about 2e kids having "spiky" profiles or asynchronous skills, this is the disconnect they're talking about. If plotting points on a graph results in a surprising curve that furthers your understanding of a concept, then it feels worthwhile. Someone who already knows that curve and the concepts behind it will find plotting those points tedious. Practice is more effective when it feels worthwhile.  Our family is knowledgeable and science-minded so the kid learned some stuff from casual conversation. The rest, the bulk of it, came from YouTub
Read more

Doing The Easy Parts Fast Impairs Communication

Image
Photo by Clark Young on Unsplash When someone begins to learn a musical instrument they play the easy parts fast and the hard parts slowly. When doctors had to sign a lot of paper prescriptions their signatures were quick to scrawl but impossible to read. Elementary school teachers write beautiful, regular, even letters on the board. I grew up with a stutter and spent years in speech therapy about it. So I've had a lot of guided practice on listening in detail to what I'm saying and how I'm saying it. I've had a lot of coaching on paying attention to how I sound to others.  Most people don't realize that the things they say most often are the hardest to understand. Language learners might study sentences for shopping, "Did you find everything you needed? How will you be paying?" then be thwarted at hearing "Dja finerrythin y'need? Cəshr card?"   Most people haven't worked on speaking more slowly nor enunciating more clearly so if you ask
Read more

Facts Versus Skills: Asynchronous Development

Image
  Photo by  Conscious Design  on  Unsplash Grownups who work with 2e (twice exceptional) kids talk a lot about spiky profiles and asynchronous development. Sometimes that means kids learn multiplication long before reading, or learn to analyze literature before getting smooth at arithmetic. But sometimes it shows up within a subject. Learning about a new topic often involves learning facts, concepts, skills, and the ability to notice details. When I started taking yoga classes I was okay at noticing and imitating the teacher’s arm and leg positions, but I didn’t notice whether her torso was straight or bent so initially I did some poses wrong in predictable beginner ways. Repeatedly hearing instructions, doing poses, and occasionally getting specific corrections from the teacher taught me to notice and imitate torso positions.  I quickly learned the facts of where to place hands and feet for downward dog pose (adho mukha svanasana). Then I learned the concept that it was supposed to in
Read more