“No. I don’t lie, Ben. And I don’t expect you to lie to me either. I don’t think you’re retarded or crazy. I do think school is hard for you and getting harder, and I’m trying to find out why. I hope you’ll help me. I promise you that when the tests are finished I’ll show you how you scored, and we’ll figure out what it means and what to do about it.”
Beep. Beep. Beep. The honk was more insistent.
“I guess you’d better go,” I said. “It sounds as though your mom is in a hurry. I’ll finish counting up and add it to the rest.”
Reluctantly, Ben came out from behind the desk. “That’s not Mom. That’s Dad’s honk.”
From downstairs a child’s voice called. My next appointment had arrived. We’d run out of time.
“Okay. Good-bye for now, Ben. Do you mind letting yourself out? I’ll see you on Tuesday.”
I walked to the lookout window in the front room as my next child climbed the stairs. I had never met Ben’s father, and I could not restrain my curiosity. A Jaguar waited in the upper part of our driveway. A black-haired man wearing dark glasses sat alone in the front seat, leaning intently over the wheel. As I watched, Ben opened the right rear door, climbed in and huddled against the window. As far as I could tell, neither the man nor the boy spoke.
“This will be a long, hard session, Ben. I’ve asked your mother to give us two hours for this one. Lots of academic things – more reading, writing. But at least each test is worth a lot of points. And let’s see.” I turned to the back cover of the folder. “You had fourteen hundred thirty-five last time, plus the first nine hundred and seventy, so you’re up to two thousand four hundred and five already.”
Ben nodded, but didn’t say anything. I handed him a small book. “Would you just read these words – there, where it says Word List Two?”
I turned to the same page in the examiner’s copy of the Spache Oral Diagnostic Reading Test so I could write down Ben’s responses. It’s of little help to know that a child made six or sixteen errors. It’s of tremendous value to know the kind of errors he made. Reading “was” as “saw” is very different from reading “was” as “were” or “house” as “home.” Each type of error has a different cause, and once you know what causes a problem, you have a much better chance of fixing it. So I tracked errors carefully.
“I thought you said you always asked,” Ben said, interrupting my thoughts,
“Pardon?”
“Last time you said you always asked about good things that happened.”
I put the examiner’s book on the desk and leaned back, feeling the little kick of excitement that comes when the child takes the initiative, but keeping my voice low to cover it. “You’re right, Ben. Pay yourself twenty-five. It’s a much better way to start.”
“Well, if it doesn’t have to have just happened, I figured I could tell you about the river.”
I nodded agreement.
“We’ve been going there ever since I was little, before I was even a year old, I think. And Mom and Dad went before that. Mom’s been going since she was born. It’s really Granny’s place. We stay there all summer, and it’s really cool.”
“That’s where you sail?”
“Yeah. We’ve got a Lightning. That’s a kind of sailboat, but you need two people to sail it. And then …” Ben stopped. “Well, we’ve got a lot of boats – the Sun-fish, a big old Garwood, and then a fiberglass speedboat and a little alinum … alminium, however you say it, boat, and a couple of canoes.”
“Sounds like there’s more boats than people,” I replied, thinking to myself that he had stumbled over “aluminum,” but he hadn’t stuttered once so far this session.
Ben almost smiled, and the whiny quality was completely gone from his voice. “No. See, there’s Granny’s big house, and then Uncle Joe uses the boathouse cottage, and we have the little house over on the other side.”
“Does Uncle Joe have kids?”
“Danny and Melissa. Danny’s almost as old as I am. He has a Lab, too – MacArthur’s brother. They get along real good.”
Ben was having no trouble talking now. We could have spent an hour just on the river, but I was supposed to be doing a diagnostic educational evaluation. I had to get on to the educational part.
“It sounds wonderful, Ben. Do you have any pictures of the river? Or maybe you could draw one and bring it next time? Anyway, pay yourself one hundred. And now, please just read the words on this page.”
Ben reluctantly picked up the book and read through the forty words. He read rapidly, stuttering toward the end, but thirty out of the forty words were correct. The errors were mainly substitutions – “far” for “fair,” “itch” for “inch,” “ether” for “either.” When he got to “guard,” he said, “I know what it is – like someone who watches prisoners – but I can’t pronounce it.” Ben had missed the last five words, which meant that he did not continue on to Word List III.
Reading the thirty words on Word List II correctly entitled him to try a fourth-grade reading selection. He substituted, omitted, and lost his place time after time, stuttering on almost every other word. But even so, he was able to answer eight out of eight comprehension questions correctly.
Just for my own interest, I had him read the fifth- and sixth-grade selections. He was way over the error limit for substitutions and omissions on both, but he still could answer six or seven of the eight comprehension questions correctly. I suspected that if I read out loud to him his understanding would far surpass his grade level.
On the Phonetic Analysis section of the reading test, Ben was unsure of vowel sounds and could not decode isolated syllables. In order to read the nonsense syllable “ock,” he said “clock” and then separated out “ock.”
He struggled through the five-minute section of the Speed and Accuracy part of the Gates MacGinitie Silent Reading Test, completing only thirteen short passages – about the amount expected of beginning fourth graders. But he did answer twelve of the thirteen comprehension questions correctly. Conversely, on the longer, more difficult Vocabulary and Comprehension sections, he raced along, obviously not reading, just guessing at answers. It was as if he felt he wasn’t going to be able to do it no matter how hard he tried, so why bother.
Written expression was painfully difficult. On the first section – dictation of a fourth-grade paragraph (I didn’t expect him to be able to write at a higher level than he could read) – his trouble with spelling and transcoding words that he heard into written symbols was even more apparent than it had been on the WRAT spelling section. He spelled circus as “cirs.” He left out many words and phrases, even though I had told him that he could have a sentence repeated as often as he wanted. But at least he wasn’t complaining, and he wasn’t giving up. Ben was struggling, but struggling gallantly, and I paid out chips generously. I wondered if anyone had any idea what it must cost Ben to go to school each day – aware, intelligent, but nowhere near the academic level of his class, “Banana Brain,” “Banana Brain” echoing in the corridors. I wondered that he went to school at all.
Halfway through the session, Ben had earned over a thousand chips. I went over to a sack in the file cabinet and brought back ten more fifty-cent pieces. Ben was pleased. “Did anybody ever get all ten silvers before?”
“A few. A few others that worked as hard as you’re working. I’ve had these fifty-cent pieces a long time. My dad collected coins, and he let me play with them when I was sick and had to stay in bed. I loved the way they looked and felt, and I decided the kids who come here might like them, too. So I mixed some in with the chips. Now, please just write a paragraph about anything you want – just a few sentences.”
Ben hesitated. “I can’t think of anything.”
“Well, try. If you don’t come up with something, I’ll give you a topic.”
Two more minutes of silence and then Ben began writing. He wrote for several minutes, and then pushed the paper toward me.
I pushed it back. “Read it t
o me first, okay?”
“One day I went sailing with Danny and a big storm came up …”
Ben read on. The ten or so sentences sounded coherent, but after he’d counted the words and was paying himself ten for each, I looked at the paper and could see that almost a third of the words he’d read to me were left out. Punctuation was nonexistent and spacing irregular. Some words collided with others, some ran off the paper, some wandered up from the line and would have been indecipherable if Ben had not first read them.
While he figured out the correct amount of chips, I got out the Detroit Test of Learning Aptitude. This is not designed to measure either intellectual potential or academic achievement, but rather to assess various categories of learning, such as visual attentive ability, auditory attentive ability, motor ability, and so forth – in other words, to discover through which modalities a child learns best.
I started with the test for Auditory Attention Span for Unrelated Words. Here the child is asked to repeat the words the examiner says. First, “cat, ice.” Each sequence becomes longer until eight unrelated words are given at one time. Ben sped along in fine shape until we reached a four-word sequence; here he became confused and repeated “cart” as “kite.” In a five-word sequence, he could repeat only three of the words correctly, and by the time we reached eight words he could repeat only two. His chin had sunk low on his chest and he muttered, “See. I g-g-guess I really am s-s-stupid.”
I counted the words he had said correctly. “You had forty-one right, Ben. Pay yourself five for each. Besides, this test doesn’t measure how smart you are – only auditory memory.”
“Audi … what? What do you mean?” Ben asked. “What’s that, anyway?”
“Auditory memory. Just a fancy way of saying ‘remembering what you hear,’” I answered.
Although Ben perked up slightly as he piled up two more silvers, from experience I knew this was indeed a rather low score. “Now try this,” I said. “See if you think it’s harder or easier than the test we just did.”
I turned to Visual Attention Span for Objects. “This time I’m going to show you some pictures. First, there’ll be two pictures, then three – more each time, and I’ll leave them out a little longer each time, too. Again, remember nobody’s ever gotten them all right.”
The first picture showed a house and a girl. Ben remembered them perfectly. He also remembered a three-picture sequence and a four and a five. He was becoming increasingly pleased with himself. Even in an eight-picture sequence, he could recall six of the eight correctly.
He piled up his earned silvers and remarked, “That was much easier than saying the words.” What he meant, of course, was that it was easier to remember what he saw than what he heard.
Ben, as well as the test, was telling me that he could process information better through visual than through auditory channels.
I was not surprised. There had been lots of indications of difficulty with auditory processing – the Digit Span of the WISC-R, dictation, and Auditory Memory for Unrelated Syllables on the Detroit. It was as if Ben’s head went on overload when too much material was presented at one time through his auditory channels. If the material was organized and meaningful, he did better, and he scored somewhat higher in Auditory Memory for Related Syllables, in which he was asked to repeat sentences. It was interesting that the overload factor was not apparent with visual stimuli.
We did five more tests on the Detroit – Motor Speed, Free Association, Memory for Designs, Oral Directions, and Visual Attention Span for Letters. These tests, too, indicated that visual memory was a strength for Ben, and auditory processing weaker. However, when he had to use a pencil to copy designs or draw them from memory, he once again had difficulty.
As so often happens, a mixed pattern of difficulties was starting to appear. Much as parents, teachers, and I myself long for one simple answer, it is always more complicated. And as I often remind myself, considering the complexities of our brains this is not surprising.
The last test of the day was my own variation of the Harris Test of Lateral Dominance. I always include this, although there is controversy about the importance of its results. It simply shows which hand, eye, and foot the child prefers to use for different tasks. The majority of the world is right-handed, right-footed, and right-eyed. For whatever reason, a large percentage of the children I see have what is known as mixed or crossed dominance: that is, they are right-handed and left-eyed or left-handed and right-eyed. Footedness (the foot used for kicking, stamping, and so forth), if there is such a word, is also noted. Research has not shown this to be a cause of learning disabilities, but still I always check it out. One more piece to the puzzle.
The trick in identifying which eye, hand, or foot a child uses is to have the child focus on the task.
“Okay, Ben. Take this piece of paper. Roll it up and then look through it and tell me how many fingers I have up. I’m going to try and fool you.”
I twined six fingers together and held them out in front of me.
Ben put the paper scope to his left eye. “Six.”
“All right. Fine. Take it down. Now once more. How many?”
Again the scroll went directly to his left eye. “Eight,” Ben said with confidence.
“Now scrunch the paper up into a ball and bring it over here.” I motioned to a spot between the two green chairs on the far side of the desk. A mural of prancing horses made of different-coloured cloth, a present from a former student, ran across the far wall. “See the orange horse at the end. Try to hit it with that paper ball.”
Ben pegged it hard with his right hand, missed, threw again with his right hand, and got the tail.
“Okay. Now put the paper right here and kick it out the door.”
Right foot. “Pick it up and hop back and put the paper in the wastebasket.” Left foot. “Now skip to the bathroom and open the door.” Ben turned the knob with his left hand. I handed him the kaleidoscope. “Quickly – how many patterns can you see before I count to three?” Left eye. “Write your full initials on the rug with your toe.” Left foot. “What do you see in this microscope?” Left eye. “Make a cross on this paper with this marker.” Right hand. “Wind the stopwatch four times.” Left hand.
Ben and I stood facing each other in the middle of the floor. Ben was actually grinning at me. “Touch your right eye.” Ben hesitated, then took his right hand and pretended to write – so he could figure out his right side – then touched his right eye. “Touch your left ear.” Hesitation, but he did it.
“Okay.” I stretched out my hands. “Touch my left hand.”
Ben did just what I would have done. He turned around so he was facing the same way I was, found which was his own left, turned back, and touched my left hand.
“Okay. That’s fine. Pay yourself two hundred seventy-five.”
Whatever mixed dominance means or doesn’t mean, children enjoy moving around and it’s a good way to wind up a session. Ben looked happier and more relaxed than I’d ever seen him.
He counted his chips carefully, and when he added them to the ones he’d saved he had 6,070.
He asked to see the Matchbox catalog and perused its pages carefully, setting the stopwatch when he started.
I watched Ben as he turned the pages with concentration, wondering, as usual, at the magic of chips. I was sure Ben had enough money stashed away somewhere to buy everything in the catalog, but somehow earning the chips to buy the car or truck or plane made it special. My guess was that the value of the chips was that each one in essence said, “You’re okay,” “You’re good,” “You’re terrific,” and my kids don’t hear that kind of thing very often.
“Hey, Mary,” Ben said, bringing me back. “Do you think the wings on this thing move?” he asked, pointing to a small green and white plane.
“I know they do.” It was the first time he’d used my name. I wanted to savor it, but there wasn’t time. “I got one for somebody else last week.” Then, suddenly, I took
a breath and asked quickly, quietly, “Why, Ben? Why does it matter if the wings move? Is it like the birds?”
Ben was silent. Had I gone too far too soon? Ben turned the catalog over and over in his hands. Finally, he said, “Yeah. Sort of.” There was another long pause, and then he added, “That’s what I was doing up there on the roof that day. I couldn’t use the porch anymore – well, I’ll tell you about that later – anyway, see, I sneaked out this old pajama top of Dad’s and I took off my shoes to get lighter, and I figured if I could flap the right way, kind of like the birds, maybe I could fly. I never did get to try it, though. Ole Jessie came out in the yard and saw me and started yelling, and then Mom called Dad and he came home from the office.” Ben shrugged. “Everybody made such a big deal out of it. That’s why I have to go to that Dr. Golden and come here. They both – Mom and Dad – think I’m crazy, but I bet it would’ve worked.”
“Suppose it hadn’t, Ben?”
Ben shrugged. “Well, at least I wouldn’t have had to go to school for a while.”
The car honked.
“I’ll check out the airplane,” I said to Ben, thinking, How can we end now? How can I send this child out and away? And yet another child was waiting downstairs, and there would be four more after her.
“Listen, Ben, maybe you could draw me a picture of what you think it would be like – flying, I mean. Why don’t you borrow these?” I said, nodding toward a box of Magic Markers. “There are sixteen different colours,” I added, as if quantity would help.
I woke early the next morning, thinking about Ben, and went up to my office and scored and reviewed as many of the tests as I could.
I studied the scores and my notes when I’d finished, and even though all the test scores weren’t in yet, it was easy to see that there was a large gap between Ben’s intellectual potential and his academic achievement. He scored far above the average range of intelligence, but his academic achievements were far below the average. This was related to his difficulties with auditory processing and memory, poor graphomotor skills, difficulty with verbal expression, and the fact that he had very little confidence in his own abilities. However, he was beginning to open up a little, and I was sure Ben’s understanding exceeded far more than he could explain in words.
A Safe Place for Joey Page 12