I did a short walk. I keep stretching my left psoas as I walk. It's tough on my body. When I got home, Yvette was conducting a driveway yoga class. There were eight students today. Fantastic! I went inside, fed Elsa, went to the bathroom, and got my mat to join the class. I thought I needed a chair to lean on, as some of the other students were doing. Scott told me I could use my walker, which I used for this exact purpose in Bikram. It was sitting at the side of the house. That worked perfectly for the standing poses. Yvette switched activities, and those using the chairs sat on them. I couldn't sit on the walker. I went inside the house to get a folding chair. I spotted my folding stepladder. Perfect!
I will have to get used to doing this work. When doing Bikram, I have made all the necessary adaptations and never pushed my body further than I could. This is new to me. If I do this often enough, I'll figure out my necessary adaptation for each pose. Yvette does a form of Iyengar called Aadil yoga. I did Iyengar in Ohio. I didn't feel the same relaxed attitude from that teacher. I will get used to working with Yvette. Besides her encouragement to do what I can the way I can, she gives terrific instruction. She tells us which part of the pose to focus on. I learned from just that one session.
I texted K, the mother, to tell her to call whenever K, the son, got up. The call finally came through much later than I expected. When he read to me, I switched to the focus to the pitch instead of the rhythm of speech; it has made a big difference. He was much more able to utilize the pitch approach on his own. He read the second page. It wasn't perfect, but it was much, much better. When I called him later in the afternoon, he sailed through page three with reasonably good pitch. We're on a plateau right now—time for practice instead of learning something new. By the way, the book we're working on is at a second-grade level. He wasn't even at a K level when I started working with him. He will be reading Harry Potter by the beginning of the school year, and he is beginning second-grade in August.
I took a nap after my first session with Kingston. Judy came over later in the afternoon to go over the article. She said there were things she didn't understand. I thought she was having trouble with the process. No, there was just information included in the article that was downright wrong or didn't make sense. They were easy enough to correct. The only part of the process she didn't get was using backward-build-up when blending sounds.
I direct students to always look for the vowels in words. If they get stuck on a word, any word, they are to look for the vowel. Then add on the sounds immediately afterward, if it is a closed syllable, blending those two sounds together. Only after that vowel and following consonant(s) are combined do they add to the sounds that come before. They should be added on one at a time, moving backward through the word. That sounded counter-intuitive to Judy. I can appreciate that. I learned backward-build up for teaching word and sentence articulation to nonnative speakers. I tried it with readers who had trouble decoding words, and it worked. Voila! What good readers do when they read is a mystery. Do we read words from front to back? Do our eyes jump around the word, looking for chunks to put together? And then there's what our conscious minds do versus our nonconscious minds. Neuroscientists can now tell us what parts of our brains we are using when we read. Maybe someday they will be able to tell us exactly what our brains process what we read. I wouldn't be surprised if that happens in my lifetime. They have a max of twenty years to get that right.
Right before I sat down for dinner, Sandor texted me to ask if he could come over to pick up some more books. He brought his glaucoma testing machine, but we never got to that. I told him that my oxygen levels have been surprisingly low. The first time I tested it with my new toy, it was 96. But every other reading has been 94 and lower. I had suspected a problem because I have been so tired. I haven't been tired every day, but often enough to be concerned. I suspect low oxygen saturation. Sandor suggested that I might be low on iron, which is needed to absorb the oxygen. He told me to check my lab results, which are available through Kaiser online. I will do that, but I remember that everything was in the normal range the last time I looked.
I love listening to Sandor as he goes through Mike's books. "Oh, my God. This is out of print!" "Look what he has here. A whole set of -------!" He assured me he wouldn't be long. I told him he could stay as long as he liked, just as long as he was comfortable with me doing my own thing. I sat on the sofa in the library, working on making some revisions to the article. Eventually, I got too tired to do any more. I went and showered to get ready for bed while Sandor continued working in the library. I told him to yell when he left. I lay in bed for a while reading. I finally heard him yell, "I'm going." After a while, I got up to lock the door, went back to bed, and turned off the light.
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