Learning In School & Beyond: Part 1

  Among the mess on my desk is a bunch of learning papers & elementary school books.
  Max spends a couple hours a week with his Miss Tutor, and another hour with Institutional Speech Therapist.  And one of us, MyGuy usually, or Boom or i, do homework with him each night: vocabulary building, math skills, problem solving strategies, thinking skills, drawing.
  MyGuy pretty much always does the same thing.  A 4-6 line story, then comprehension questions.  i've got a range of books i work from, or something from the internet, or i make up my own worksheets.
  It drives me crazy to see him bring home math sheets, or any sort of worksheet, from "Company A" (day service) with uncorrected wrong answers.
  We go over them.
  i've taken to pointing out his RIGHT answers - no, 'fraid i didn't do it all along.
  He actually does have a lot of right answers.

A few years ago, one of his teachers needed to write "Max's rules" on the wall because he kept tearing up the rules written on paper.

  Some of the wrong ones are:

• The top of the page asks him to ID pictures, such as glue (bottle), broom, and the bottom of the page asks him to draw a different word with the same vowel sound. Labeling the glue & broom was easy for him.  But,  instead of drawing say a moose, he's drawn another glue bottle & broom. 
• A lot of them are math papers, using problems where he's demonstrated he can do the work, either recently or years back, before the school dropped teaching instead of work experiences, with lots of wrong answers.
• Comprehension pages, where conprehension is demonstrated by choosing the requested color for the named area.  He's been doing these things for 20 years, and doing it effortlessly for at least 15.
• Time-telling exercises.  Here's an image of a clock; notice where the hands are.  What time does it show? 2o hears ago, these exercises showed on the hour, then on the half hour & on the fifteen minutes, but he's been doing the to the one minute ones fornearly 10 years.  This is something he uses daily; no opportunity to forget.
• Sometimes there's no-comprehension story comprehension pages.
  

  He's simply forgotten the addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, skills that he had, because he hasn't used them.
  Max is pathetically happy to understand the procedures again.
  Not that he actually enjoys the drill, but he loves the Aha! of getting it.

  It's a bumpy path forward, but he's learning.
  A few days ago, he even got himself checked out at the store while i was still shopping!  The clerk assured me he'd done it right, too.