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kbutton

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Everything posted by kbutton

  1. I had a winter coat with enormous pockets. I was gloriously hands-free for several years. I "lost" things in those pockets, but I always had what I needed.
  2. ...and your kids see their dad flying in his plane (gas alone...$$$) while the family has lost income. Apparently your husband doesn't internalize it the way you do, respond the way you do, or even send the same message you do, so why would the kids? The kids probably think, "If he's doing this, everything is fine even if mom is a bit stressed." Then they probably strongly identify behaviorally with whichever parent is more like they are and behave accordingly. And I'm guessing you don't want kids behavior = husband's behavior (and a whole list of other people in your life that are foolish). I am really sorry. It stinks. I hope you can make some choices that make you feel more in control and come to some kind of peace with your DD and her finances.
  3. I think you mentioned later in the thread that you want her to have a cushion. I think it would possible to leave her a small cushion and basically tell her that between now and x date (soon), she is going to pay you most of what she owes you OR give you essentially all of her money except $xxx so that she does have a cushion. Maybe she'll be able to sell things on Craigslist or find other work even if it's not for long or for the whole semester. Maybe she will decide to get an on campus job and sort out her class schedule (maybe taking classes online for cheap after she graduates to fulfill her minor since she has two majors). Just thinking out of the box--no idea what solutions might be available to her. But I think it's totally reasonable that you demonstrate to her that her money is, indeed, spent. It's GONE for all practical purposes. If you think you need to help replace the car, you have a fresh slate (if I understand correctly) to start new and decide things on your own terms. Or she can go without a car in podunkville, which I did for two years at college. Or, she can drive the less reliable car, and you can give her the choice between "helping" her SAVE (You can make monthly payments ahead of time to me so that you have a down payment when you need it...) or paying for AAA. Or some combination of ideas. I agree with the above in spirit and think you could hash out details more to your liking if the specifics don't work for you. It's not bad luck to be treated according to your own maturity. In this case, she's not missing a car because someone else did something stupid. She's avoiding responsibility (meant neutrally--whether she means to be avoiding or not--the outcome is that she is avoiding it). Also, it's impossible to treat kids equally, but it is possible to be fair while being unequal. I like the percentage idea too--quite possibly as savings toward the car, etc. after paying a more immediate "installment." I think concrete is good. Regarding the second comment, I think it's largely personality. Parents consistently produce children who differ from each other in the BEST and WORST of circumstances. I don't think that your background isn't meaningful and relevant, however. I just think that some people are eternally optimistic that things are going to look up for them, work out, etc., and they seize opportunities that come along without even understanding the cause and effect. Truly. Metaphorically speaking, you made an amazing parking spot for your daughter, and she just sees an open parking spot. She has no idea you dug up a chunk of your yard by hand, poured the concrete, painted the lines, etc. Or if she does, she thinks that's just normal, or that it's how you do things 'cause your cool and talented. And she just nonchalantly pulled into it, dripped oil all over it, and parked half on-half off the concrete onto your flower bed. Some people, I am coming to learn, are like that. There is always another parking space just where they need it often enough that they think they are lucky or even hard-working.
  4. We had two ABA therapists, but we started a bit younger. We wanted someone more familiar with autism than other people who had worked with him. The first one worked on social skills and compliance during difficult tasks--not getting too goofy or too noncompliant if something got hard. A LOT of stuff got better with ADHD meds that were as effective as needed (it took time for us to find the right dosing, duration of dose). Some maturity helped. In general, I think it was time well spent when they worked on social skills--they did everything from read about social situations in books and discuss them to taking outings to do tasks where he had to assert himself (like purposefully building in phone skills or ask the manager skills at stores), volunteering together at our church's thrift store, etc. He really responded well to having scenarios come up in books that he had to think through and talk through--less intimidating than confronting them real time. Oh, he also benefitted big time from some face/body language work mapped to grades of emotions. He had kind of a mental bucket for positive or negative without much room for shades of meaning to words, faces, body language, tone of voice, etc. He also did some work on solifying daily routines with the therapist.
  5. I think I would listen to her and find out what she does, how she'd list your home what her rationale is for a price, etc. I found that the realtor that helped us find our house was not who I wanted to sell our house--I wanted someone who communicated a lot more. I think it's like anything else where you need more than one quote--you go by what they tell you (and how they explain it), whether you think you can work with them, and what sense you can make of what they say--do they explain well, are you hearing what you want to hear and nothing else, or are you hearing good things plus some "you need to consider this" things.
  6. You might need to get a realtor that specializes in your kind of property even if they are from a little farther away. Your property is kind of a niche property, and there are realtors that tend to do well with selling that kind of property.
  7. Maybe the plunging pushed dirty water and such back up into the holes in the rim? If so, it could take a little time to work itself out as it's like a sieve under the rim, I think. I would get some CLR (the real stuff, not a related product by the same company) and use it according to directions a few times. Flush lots between now and then.
  8. It's not awful to think that about kidney donation in those circumstances, especially. I honestly don't think it's awful even if the donor is likely to always expected to be healthy enough to have only one kidney. Your DH's medical issues were complicated and the unknowns for inheriting them are still pretty unknown. The rest, I think, is very normal to think about.
  9. Professor Carol? https://www.professorcarol.com/discovering-music/ https://www.professorcarol.com/exploring-americas-musical-heritage/
  10. I am sorry that you have to deal with this. Your feelings are valid, and I would be very hurt if this happened to me. Regarding the quote below, my grandmother embodied this kind of crazy across the board. She asked that her wedding pics be destroyed if they were found in her sister's estate, so what really happened is they were found and saved without a remark to her. She definitely lied about the date of the marriage for years even while my grandfather always gave the real date (I think sometimes during the same conversation)! But she had so much more crazy. I think the fact that it wasn't just about a wedding date, pictures, etc., made it easier to be at peace with the crazy--we could just write it off and say it was her way of dealing with things. I hope you are able to work through your feelings in a meaningful way.
  11. I am so sorry to hear this. My ASD kiddo likes to be with others when someone dies and likes to pay his respects, but he's an extrovert. He also had some experiences very early with older relatives dying, people gathering, funerals, etc. to set the stage for what to expect. I will pray for you all.
  12. I am not surprised that book is hard because it's combining a bunch of tasks--noticing, comparing, then spitting it out in sentences. The 100% concepts TOC makes a useful word list, lol! I am not sure the exercises hit on the concepts in a way that my son would need--he need to get things out, but the understanding seems to be there. The bolded is SO TRUE. I think too that my son limped along making sense of things his own way by just hanging onto a million bits of small information by just periodically tossing the overflow into some linguistic catch-all. If his problems had been identified early on, he might have benefitted from this stuff early so that things could go into a useful place tidily. Now, it's in there, but it's not necessarily in there in a way that has all the typical associations required to bring it out. It's in there in a very eclectically ( to most people, dis-)organized way. Thanks for reposting some of these--I am not sure everything would be applicable as is, but I printed TOCs and samples (which are nicely labeled at the bottom by the publisher), and I am going to keep a file of things that might be useful. I am also looking at the intermediate levels of some of the same stuff. Ironically, I think my other kiddo might benefit a little from some of the titles--he actually does good things with language, but he's always running behind with his CAPD. It's harder for him to use context, for example, to pick up on a new word meaning, because it's all going by him so fast. The Word Origins and/or Roots, Prefixes, and Suffixes might be good for him. He might also be fine with a good vocab curriculum though. He is exceptionally good at reading for meaning and backtracking to make sure he's caught what he needs to. It's just that he can't do that when he's listening because he has no control over the pacing of what someone else says. Sometimes the entire topic has changed or the person talking has left the conversation before he realizes what he missed and can ask a question (or make a relevant comment).
  13. That Only X, Only Y, and Both X and Y "verbal" Venn diagram might actually function as a cloze passage for my son to prompt the kinds of words he needs to get out. Yeah, I have looked at a lot of your links, but I can't keep track of all of them, lol! We've had way too much going on. I have printed several and sent them to the SLP to discuss.
  14. So, the SLP is getting familiarized with SGM materials that we're going to use, and she is being more optimistic about the parts coming together for my son. She says, first of all, that a lot of the parts are there, but he doesn't know where/when to pull them out, and that having one overarching tool from which to pull is going to be meaningful for him. In contrast to "having a graphic organizer for that," the SGM marker gives him the whole enchilada in a consistent way, and then he can say, "This assignment has a subset of these SGM pieces, let me pull those together." They still go in roughly the same order. Some pieces might be repeated or "disguised" as a more abstract concept. But instead of having a series of graphic organizers where he has to generalize a huge list of different kinds of organizers by combining and recombining them after using them in a very specific way each time. This way, the tool stays consistent, and he takes parts and pieces of it to suit the situation. She thinks this will even help with him learning to make labels, categories, and statements of generalizations. We do see some areas where we might need to pull in more stuff, but most of it is surrounding "clue" words. So, for reading, he might look for certain clue words in a science text vs. a history text, but those word lists belong in a certain part of the SGM process that stays consistent (either the "problem/attempt" area or the critical thinking triangle). For writing, he would be reversing the process and using those words to make the connections for the reader. SGM already has some examples of how the verbs and other clue words change by discipline, subject matter, narrative vs. expository, range of concrete to abstract, etc. We just see that we're going to have to fill in with some of them (other than feelings--they have feeling words readily available). Also, the SGM has some pre-drawn organizers that show some of the combining and recombining, but emphasize that you can do this yourself in many, many ways. They just provided some of the more common ones. I do like the stuff you've posted about The Writing Revolution. I wanted to clarify about that in case it sounds like I"m not looking at it or considering the possibilities. I have actually done some of those kinds of things with my son, and when he sees where they are helpful, he does pull those things out. It's just that doing those alone didn't translate to those gains in central coherence, generalization, etc. They DO contribute to him being able to write stylistically interesting and complex sentences. But, he gets grammar, and he has an ear for language, so I am not sure the exercises do as much to teach him those things as show him that he does, indeed, possess those skills so that he can use them confidently. I think this really illustrates Lovecky's point that 2e kids need both the big picture and the details. I would go a step farther and say that sometimes 2e kids work the problem from both the microscopic and the telescopic ends and it clicks in the middle, lol! Or, it could be that the spelling in Barton planted a seed, but the "why do we spell" (language is broken into meaningful chunks at the sentence, phrase, word, and even syllable level) needed more contexts in which your son could generalize that it was important. Then, he started to understand those chunks, and it was relevant. But if you hadn't done Barton and at least tried, perhaps, even recognizing the chunks might not have been enough to create an interest. Not sure if that makes sense. But anyway, I think it's good that you were responsive to the fact that spelling wasn't going anywhere and got at the core issue. I just sometimes think that it's often Core Issue Resolved + Who Knows What + More Instances of Both = Results. ? I think we sometimes just don't know what specific thing will connect stuff for our kids, and not taking things for granted means we can keep presenting a buffet of things for their minds to latch onto.
  15. Essays are definitely a problem! He can get factual information out, but sometimes he doesn't tie it together with a bow or give it context; however, all the relevant details are there. I think he will get past some of this, but it's taking time. It's not just a matter of not being jazzed about writing about history, but it's also not easy to describe what the problem is (or even test it!). He has GREAT skills at presenting things, but it's hard for him to know what the other person needs/wants to know. It's getting slowly better in some ways. He is very much a person who will sound a bell that something is wrong in time to fix it or prevent a problem, but he just spits out the facts in a way that sometimes you have to SEE there is a problem among the facts, or realize his body language is showing that there is a problem. It's kind of hard to explain. I hear you on the e-mail thing, lol! I worked as a tech writer, and sometimes important e-mails took longer to craft than the actual product documentation because they had to cover things succinctly but specifically.
  16. He's 14 and a mature 14 in many ways. He will be employable--he already is in demand for handyman stuff, and he often works alongside the person hiring him. When we had our yard excavated recently, the excavator hired him as day labor, and he did a good job. He has age-mate friends. When I say communication, I am really thinking written communication. He struggles (at this point) with this. He struggles with academic load (mostly due to language issues and being a person who needs downtime) and with written output of various kinds. When an area of disability can be minimized, he SHINES. Many people are stunned if/when they find out he has autism and ADHD.
  17. I would love to know more about what analysts do. Do they need a lot of gestalt processing skills? What are they analyzing and looking for? I could use examples from several fields. I just really have NO IDEA what exists out there. Do they need communication skills to do well at their job? My son is good at analysis and has amazing VSL strengths on the WISC V, but I am not sure he analyzes something if he's not told to and told why--he's 2e (ASD/ADHD, language issues). It's funny you mention economics because that is the one high school social studies course he's expressed an interest in, lol! (On the agenda for this year even though he'll be a 9th grader.) He's done fine with the stats stuff he's been introduced to--duck meets water for the most part. He's a super hands-on kid, so the question on my part may be moot, but at some point, I would think some hands-on stuff needs to be analyzed too.
  18. But that's the thing--he can do it at lower levels and it wasn't being explicitly taught. Then, suddenly, he couldn't. It was shifting from abstract to concrete. It's like it's assumed that the skill will carry over, and I really do not think it always does. And no one seems to want to spend the time working on generalizations and categories and comparing things in order to foster that. It drives me nuts. I have been asking for years at this point for this to happen. If he can't make a generalization for a paragraph, he can't really write a meaningful paragraph, but the other skills are there, so it looks like he can. But he can't. And then he's not going to be able to do this on a test or any other time. It also makes it really, really hard for him to know how to do any studying with a purpose, outline information so that he can review it, etc. Just about every study skill outside of memorization hinges on being able to extract information and make a generalization with it.
  19. To clarify what I am talking about...Warriner's English Grammar and Composition's definition of a generalization (which is what I mean, though I would scale it down to include labels/categories and scale it up to being a series of generalizations, such as an introductory paragraph for a longer work)... Warriner's goes on to say: If a student is writing some kind of factual paragraph, sometimes they do not need to make a generalization in order to make a topic sentence, or they might make a really superficial one, state an opinion, etc. depending on the kind of paragraph they are writing. A really good paragraph is one that is taking salient details and then spitting them back in a slightly more abstract form as a generalized statement. Categories are basically generalizations shrunk to a single word or to a phrase--we do this for outlining sometimes. Textbooks will have subheadings that might be one word, a phrase, or a sentence. Those are often generalizations. Titles and captions are sometimes generalizations, depending on the context of the work. I think it's probably true that central coherence has to be there to make a generalization, but I do think that a lot of the materials out there do not support making an academic-ish generalization at the discourse level, as SGM would put it. I think what I've seen falls short of that. I don't have my SGM book in front of me (the SLP has it right now), but she talks about making generalizations and does not devote much time or space to it. I think she uses it in the same way that I do, though she might talk about it only at the statement level. I have not yet grasped how she thinks a person gets from picking apart the story or expository piece to making a generalizations, but she says that students need to be able to make generalizations. I think she does say that students might need to be taught to do this explicitly, but I can't say that I figured out how that's supposed to happen. My experience seems to be that you can lead the horse to water, but you can't make him drink. This includes instances when the central coherence thing seems to be adequately supported, the material is definitely understood, we are getting RELEVANT details for writing paragraphs, those details are arranged in coherent and logical sentences--it's all there. No generalization comes forth. Much discussion ensues. It's obvious the kid gets the gist, the gestalt, the point. No generalization comes out. Ever. Zip, zilch, nada.
  20. Oh, the Met Life broadcasts brought this up, I think, but family members with good intentions can wreak havoc on things by leaving stuff to SN kids the "wrong" way. That is something to communicate to well-meaning family members that might be inclined and have the means to leave an inheritance.
  21. Well, when we did set stuff last year, there were focuses on both similarities and differences--there was extensive notation about subsets, intersections, all kinds of things. My DS had to make himself a chart to keep track of the verbiage to go with the symbols. I think there was also quite a bit of using the same stuff to do more than one thing, look at it from different criteria. The sorting exercises we did with the real number system was taking the same information and looking at it multiple ways and spitting it out in multiple formats. Both the similarities and differences in those formats jogged my son's brain toward a point of central coherence. He does this non-verbally a lot of the time, but I think it happens faster and more easily with nonverbal information. I think the sorting process just works better. I think he still notices differences more easily, but those differences translate into practical application and learning more readily. Well, I have trouble with brilliantly simple. I make complicated simple, but I am not so great at making simple complicated. I once misread directions (that were not particularly informative to start with) for a writing assignment. I was to discuss the main implications of an assigned text. I wrote a paragraph. The prof expected 2-3 pages (that was the part I missed). But he gave me an A because I managed to say in one paragraph what everyone else said in 2-3 pages. I hadn't really left anything out except the fluff, and he recognized that. I guess when you talk about how characters are similar and different, maybe you are getting sentences out, but I would expect the salient details. My son gives all or nothing--he can't sift the details. He can't give a label or category for how they are the same or different. He can sort those details and maybe even notice them, but the piles would have no abstract way he could discuss them. He would just list all the obvious stuff without making a point, and then he'd be like, "This is dumb, you read the same story--you know all the same bits I do." And he'd be right--he just restated it all in a different way without getting to the heart of the matter. He wouldn't understand why people want to rehash the details. It's totally possible to answer those questions you are asking and still not have central coherence. I guess that is what I am getting at. [It's also possible, especially when you are new to information, to overgeneralize. I sometimes do this, though I often figure it out and sort it out later. I am often seeing a relationship, for instance, but it sounds like I blurring categories because I haven't yet figured out how to describe the relationship I'm seeing, and some purist takes issue with it because I am blurring lines they don't want blurred in service of extracting that intangible thing I am still sorting out. But sometimes, those distinctions are more insider baseball than something that is super meaningful to anyone else, and it's important to my brain to find that relationship.] Being able to make statements to answer the questions you are referencing is one thing, but writing them up is totally different, and realizing what bits and pieces another person needs to hear to understand it too is a third thing. I think it's possible to be able to discuss those questions and not be able to put that into writing or to condense it into a meaningful data point or a concise statement. At some point, you have to have a topic sentence (or topic paragraph, etc.) that glues the discussion or list of facts or similarities together with a category (label, thought, sentence, assertion, etc.). It's just generalization scaled to different levels. I will look at the connections thing, but I don't know if you and I mean the same thing by connections. The updated link works--thanks.
  22. You have to have an account. You just don't have to friend anyone or have settings that allow people to easily find and friend you. You don't have to accept friend requests. If her privacy settings are super tight, she might have to friend someone else so they can find her, but once she's in the group, she can just tell that person, "I don't use FB, so don't be upset that I am unfriending you now that you've added me to the group." Once she's in the group, she should set it so that she receives notifications of posts to the group via e-mail. She might have to log in to see the full post or to respond to something, but if she gets notifications, then she shouldn't have to get on FB constantly to monitor what's going on in the group.
  23. The Texas thing reminds me that one place I've learned (or learned new insights about) unusual tidbits is through Henry Louis Gates' various genealogy programs. I haven't seen all of them, but he finds interesting ways to juxtapose guests' backgrounds in ways that make historical events intersect and bring up little known facts. He also has a series on African American history that had lots of facts that I would not know otherwise. So about Texas, he did a segment about Eva Longoria's ancestors (I think), pointing out that they were "here" basically as long as anyone else's ancestors have been. Very, very interesting. HLG also did a segment on John Legend, and it turns out that he has descendants in common with a woman who lives locally to me. I don't know if she knows about this particular program segment, but she wrote a book on local African American history. She looks at the history of the few African American families left in the town nearby (and she sells the books to raise money for a local church that has a free meal program!). Her own family endured leaving slavery (an ancestor buying various family members and leaving the south), only to have some of the kids stolen and carried back into slavery! Anyway, I was streaming this segment and had to stop it to find my copy of this woman's book. Sure enough, John Legend is descended from the same family she is, and I was hearing that same horrifying tale on TV after reading her book. I still get chills thinking about it. Almost everything I know about Texas or Hawaii is something I learned as an adult and often by reading historical fiction and then digging more. That sounds like a cool and complicated job.
  24. I worry about this a little with my son, but overall, he's actually pretty good with perspective taking. It would be on his conscience that he's not making a great trade, but he would have a hard time inhibiting that (hypothetically). I think he usually lands on the side of being equitable, but not always. It's just that if he misses, he tends to miss by a mile. Our first behaviorist (and to some extent, the second) worked on this a lot with my son, but he kind of got to an in-between level where stuff was either too little kid for him or too mature. He's changed a lot this year, so it might be a good idea to get back into the groove of working on some of the social things. Having a brother has been good for this--his brother is quite willing to tell him he's not being nice, lol! I also see kids who have some ADHD or EF issues that struggle with this too. That knowing vs. being able to make themselves do it is hard.
  25. Please keep reading if there is more to your source, and let us know what other nuggets you find. I think that several issues are bound up in this idea and hinge on each other. It would be nice to show this information to intervention specialists and speech people and IEP team members and say, "So what are you going to do about this?" I have been banging the drum for a while that activities related to this kind of processing stop very far short of the abstract level, and that's precisely where it starts to fall apart for my son. Even if he has holes in the lower levels, stopping right in the middle of the most important thing he needs is super, super damaging. And everyone seems to want to do everything EXCEPT work on these skills (the SLP is up for whatever if we can find a way to make it all go together) and when these skills show up as deficient, they kind of change the subject. It doesn't help if they see the out-of-the-box thinking as divergent and only a good thing, not seeing the debilitating side. They literally think that if he can think out of the box, then that is a sign that TYPICAL THINKING is INTACT!!! Or, they see that he can be led (via discussion) to typical conclusions, so he must be able to make those leaps on his own, right? At least SGM says that having to be prompted via discussion means that the student is NOT as discourse level. I would love to be able to bring chapter and verse and be kind of blunt. I would even get on the phone with the SGM lady (since she said to call her back when I get my bearings with the materials) and ask her if she has tools for this. She mentions making generalizations, but it's cursory. I have exactly one source that tackles making generalizations head-on--an old Warriner's English Grammar and Composition book. But it has about three pages on it, and that is it. But it does come right out and talk about how this skill is necessary for parts of the writing process.
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