Beginning is the hard part.

Ashton saw the counselor yesterday. She advised her to do her current assignments first and then work on older ones she was missing. Ashton was pretty enthusiastic when she came home about having a plan and being able to get things done. But I didn't help things by trying to help her with her writing assignment. I misunderstood it at first and by the time I understood it, I had lectured in my manic way for quite a while. Then she went off and wrote a starting paragraph and came back and read it to me and she'd gotten the assignment wrong, just the way I had at first misunderstood it.

I forget how odious writing is to her and everyone who has not taken to writing as a personal challenge. I used to be that way. I was afraid to put a single word down because I was afraid that I was always heading in the wrong direction. I had a bit more excuse because when I was confronted with writing assignments, there were no word processors and auto-correct. There were pencils and pens and paper, and if you were older and very brave, typewriters and White-out and those extremely hard erasers that destroyed the very paper you typed on.

She is comfortable enough playing on the computer, I need to teach her to be at ease typing on it. I know that she finished yesterday very disappointed. I need to give her hope that we can fix this and that it won't be so awful. It may not be fun, but it shouldn't be torture.

I think I need to give her some typing exercises, ones that are easy and give her a fun target that motivates her. The first part should be typing whatever comes into her mind, as fast as she can, for a reward. Start with a nickel a word and go down to a penny a word. Spelling shouldn't count at first but the words must be mostly there. The sentences should make sense too. Although for the very first exercise it probably doesn't matter. She needs to connect the act of typing to the act of thinking and there needs to be a reward to it so that it's clear that it has value.

The exercises should be timed so she can easily see the end but it's clear that the longer the piece the better (the larger the reward). The first one should be a minute long and I'll keep score. We can keep the exercises at a minute each for a while. Eventually, we need to switch over to to a short essay based exercise. I give her an outline of an essay and ask her to expand the bullet points.

I need to research essay writing to learn the structure and the terminology involved. That way I can teach her that at the same time.

I'll wrap this up so that I can get to work on this.

More later,