The Po Show

No Surprises Here

I went to meet with the school psychologist this morning to go over the results of Matthew's tri-annual psycho-educational evaluations. (As an aside, here's a sort of funny, sort of pathetic story: Ross was supposed to go to the meeting with me. He cleared his calendar for this morning and planned to go to work late. We talked at length last night about what we were going to discuss. Then the poor automaton woke up at 5:30 and went into work as usual. I called him up when I got up, saying "What happened?" and he was like, "What?").

So the results were pretty much what I expected. Super high scores for analytical, performance stuff, average for reading and computational stuff, and really poor for writing and spelling. The poor child definitely has some kind of processing disorder, and he just can't figure out how to sound words out. The psych. said she'd find a program to help him separate words into sounds, and she plans to tell his teacher and the special ed. teacher that he needs to be using markers and tiles to break down words. He needs to work on keyboarding too. Ambre, if you have any other suggestions for what might help, I'd appreciate it. (His percentile score on the Pseudoword Decoding portion of the TOWL was 2!)

The other not surprising, but sad part was the socio-emotional section. He comes up as At Risk and Clinically Significant for a lot of elements, including depression, interpersonal relations, attitude toward school, social stress, inattention, self-reliance, and personal adjustment. Most of this is through self-report. I know we're doing all the right things, and his therapist is very enthusiastic about his progress, but there is such a long way to go, I'm afraid.

No surprises, but sometimes it's not good to not be surprised.