I missed writing about Sunday. It was uneventful. Church, reading, napping. Kathrin went to stay with a friend for a few days.
I spent an hour to an hour and a half cutting back the blue flower vine off the fence I share with my neighbor. I like doing this work. It's hot and sweaty but detailed work. It's like a game of pick up sticks: to free one vine, I have to cut away another.
I went to school and worked with two students. I first worked with a girl, K, in Mrs. Buffington's class. The child lacks confidence, not confidence in her reading, confidence in her ability to survive making a mistake. She didn't want to read. I had her name the letters in the words. Doing this keeps her in contact with print and helps improve her visual perception of the letters in the words.
I also worked with B, a boy from Mrs. Davis's class. He had not used the auditory processing center as I taught him to. If anything, it was more blocked. I asked him directly how he felt about using it. Thumbs down. He said it felt weird, and he didn't like that. Sorry bud, if you're going to make a change, you're going to have to go through weird. I also worked on identifying vowel sounds, the effect of the silent e at the end of a one-syllable word, blending using cross body blending, and a tolerance for the unknown.
Then I went to the bank and post office. I found three statements of payment from a retirement fund. I had thought they were from Ohio, but, no, they were from NJ. NJ claimed they had sent me these checks, overpaying me by a mere $3,000, which they are going to reclaim. I checked with my local bank that I had, in fact, deposited there. Raymond James had no record of them.
While I was there, I got a notarized document stating that I was Mike's wife to get a record of his medical and prescription payments for the year for next year's tax purposes.
Then off to the post office to mail the notarized letter to Kaiser Permanente to request the statements and mail a large envelope containing 83-year-old documents I found when going through old papers. These papers document my father's efforts to secure affidavits for members of my family, who were Jewish and still stuck in Nazi Germany. I discovered that my uncle had initially been denied a visa because he had psoriasis. Can you imagine being condemned to death because of that? My father wrote to the authorities that psoriasis wasn't contagious, and it could be cured. The first is true; the second is not.
There was also a letter concerning relatives of mine who didn't make it out. Alfred and his wife Lina died in Auschwitz. Their daughter Antonia survived in a concentration camp at Theresienstadt. My father was able to bring her over to America when she was 21, after the war. She lived a full life here and died in old age in Florida.
Where did these papers come from? I had never seen them; they were in Mike's files. I don't know how he got hold of these papers rather than me. I have now mailed them on to my cousin Mike, who is the family archivist.
I tried to nap when I came home but didn't have a lot of luck. I read some more from the binder that Mike got from the Mercy Center in SF as part of his program to be certified as a spiritual director. There are some notes of his own. I was hoping I would gain some more insight into him, but they're strictly academic.
Josh and Yvette were coming up for dinner. I made a point of walking Elsa and bathing her before dinner to be presentable for our appointment with the vet on Tuesday. Yvette picked up food from a Thai place in town. Yum! They talk story about their adventures with Izzy, their 13-year-old dog.
Izzy was diagnosed with glaucoma. Besides having no vision left in her right eye, glaucoma caused the eye to swell. Painful. Yvette and Josh chose to have the eye removed. She had to wear a cone for two weeks while the eye healed. They kept a careful eye on her to make sure she didn't get into trouble. Yvette took off from work. Whenever she was home, she carried Izzy in a dog backpack. The day before the stitches were to be taken out, Yvette went out, and Josh didn't pay attention for a minute. Because their door was open, Izzy could get out at will. When Josh looked up and saw her, her cone was covered with blood. Josh freaked out. As he cleaned her face, working to determine how her eye was, he cleaned away chunks of flesh. He thought she had been attacked and not only had her stitches been torn out, but flesh from within the eye was affected. When he got her cleaned up, he saw that the eye was just fine.
Then he thought she must have gotten into to meat B left out. He went down to check with him. There was a pig's head sitting in the driveway. Now, Josh understood the source of all that blood and flesh. He did text B to let him know what happened. B came up to apologize.
Elijah had shot his first pig. They had butchered it and left the head out. Besides being messy, eating pig flesh poses an additional problem for dogs. Dogs can get pseudo-rabies from pig meat. While this form of rabies does not affect humans, it is fatal for dogs. Yvette called the vet. They told her they hadn't seen many cases of it, and many dogs on the island had a taste of raw pig flesh. They would know after four days if they were in the clear.
I soaked my foot as I watched television. Doing this gives me a great excuse not to search for books on the list. It's hard to do in so many ways. Time-consuming and heart-consuming. I did some work on the blog while watching Murder Call and Australian series. When it started, I was struck with how bad the acting was. But there as many shows in this series as there are in a soap opera. The performers keep on improving.
I walked Elsa. I usually read a little before switching off the light at night. I have been reading A Diary of a Country Priest. Too boring. I started a book of Jewish Folktales. I will take this to Seattle and give it to Karin and David to read to Sam.
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Musings: I'm putting this separately so those who are not interested can choose not to read it.
Some reading experts argue that when teaching reading, comprehension is king. As far as they are concerned, teaching word recognition skills without engaging comprehension is not reading. They are opposed to teaching word recognition skills apart from a context where a student also works on comprehension. Can you guess? I'm not in that school of thought.
As a counter-argument, one could say that seeing is not seeing unless there is perceptional processing of what is seen. Therefore, we should never repair vision problems unless it is in the context of perception of the real world. (Surgery?) Problem: there is no visual perception without seeing. If there are problems with seeing, that should be addressed first. Likewise, students who have difficulties with word recognition need to have these needs addressed, and they can be addressed independently of or simultaneously with comprehension.
If the argument is that teaching word recognition outside of the context of comprehension is boring, I don't find it that way. I find working on both phonics, which I approach through phonemic awareness, and instant recall, which I approach through cognitive techniques, fun. Yes, fun. I love it. I find it endlessly fascinating. When teaching phonemic awareness, I learn something new about the language regularly. I find the correlation between orthography and phonemes in English so much fun. It's a game. Because I see it that way, I can pass this on to my students.
Since comprehension can be taught without someone being able to read 'words' for one reason or another, I see it as a separate discipline, as complicated to teach as English word recognition.
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