I called Kitchen Aid customer service this morning. I hoped they would have an answer Sears hadn't been able to provide. It took half an hour before I got a human to speak to. While waiting for an answer, I searched in the library for books. I found a surprising number, given I had already searched this whole section once before. Now, each bay is alphabetized. Once I have looked again through all the shelves for the second time, I will alphabetize several bays. When I finished all the pages of the requested books, I checked through all the remaining unclaimed books. Sometimes I classified a book under the subject name rather than the editor. I'm not always sure which is best.
The customer service person at Kitchen Aid was lovely. I wanted to be indignant, act out my bad mood about the problems with the stovetop. However, I have learned you attract more flies with honey than vinegar. Given that I have heard the expression all my life, it is time. It took a minute for me to communicate my problem. She thought I was saying all the igniters on the stove clicked at once when I turned on one of the burners. That was normal. She finally got it; they continued clicking for the whole cooking time. No, that's not normal.
She gave me the name of two companies that service Kitchen Aid in Hawaii. I almost laughed. I imagined they would all be on Oahu, a mere 200 miles away -by air. I called both numbers and got an immediate answer to the second. Yes, they are here, here, right here in Kona, where I live. Wow! I doubt they will have any more success than the Sears folks. I suspect there is something minor wrong; there's some dirt interfering with the electric transmission.
While I was on the phone with the local repair company, I turned on the back burner on the far right. Huh? No additional clicking noises. I told her she was magic. She fixed my stovetop. We laughed together. After I got off the phone with her, I tried it again. Yes, when I turned on the back burner on the far right, there was no clicking. Then I tried the middle burner; oh, dear. There was the clicking again. The same thing happened when I turned on the back burner on the far left. Oh, well. I made an appointment for her serviceman to come next Wednesday.
I had texted John, Jean, my hanai sister's husband. I know he's been using Skype for years. The editor I had contacted refused to work on Zoom, insisting, incorrectly, that it would cost him money. I hoped John could help me figure out how to download Skype and post the icon on the dock. John said he only used Skype as a substitute for making a telephone call. He didn't even use their video option. He also had no idea how to get the icon on the dock. Sweet of him to offer; I decided I would try August, the family tech guy. This felt like too much effort for a guy, the editor, that I had some serious questions about.
To begin with, his ad is l-o-ng and w-o-r-d-y with highlighted sections. I worried that he would go on and on in our sessions at $85 an hour. No, I don't think he would do that just to get more money; I think he was just a Trump, in the same sense, some people are Karens. Whatever my doubts were, he confirmed my concerns when I finally did make telephone contact with him. He called me technologically incompetent when I didn't know how to put the Skype icon on the dock. His inadequacies with Zoom were a reflection of what? Well, I'm sure you know the type. I knew he would be more trouble than he was worth.
I responded to his ad because of his method; he did live editing. He goes over the text with the author; I was under the impression that the other editor who advertised on Craig's list just used the conventional method. While it made me sad to use the traditional approach to editing, I decided I couldn't work with the first editor I contacted. I went back to Craig's list ad for the other editor. Hey, he does do co-editing. I wrote him immediately.
I had a session with D. Inspired by what I learned about how the Brain works from Dahaene, the author of Reading in the Brain. I developed an exercise that I hoped would help him overcome some of his perceptual problems. D. will still misread words, mixing up or ignoring the order of the letters. He still has zero recall for math facts we have worked on repeatedly.
I have tried to help him using BrainManagementSkills. I try to get him to use his left hemisphere more than his right. He is consistently reluctant. I have tried everything.
Using what I learned from Dahaene, I first told him how the Brain works. The primary visual cortex perceives conjunctions. Somehow these conjunctions are recognized as objects versus letters. Letters are sent to the letterbox on the brain's left side from the primary visual cortex on both sides. This data is pushed forward in the brain. The visual fragments from the visual cortex are arranged into letters in the next step. In the next layer forward, the letters are organized into bigrams. Bigrams are common letter pairs like am, op, bl, or fr, but not fj, qv, rb. The point is that the brain must perceive the fragments before it perceives larger units, like letters and bigrams, and eventually words.
Working on the assumption that D. does not perceive the basic elements, I introduced an exercise where I write v-e-r-y slowly; more accurately, I form the letters and numbers very slowly. I ask him to make a logical choice. If I start the form with a straight vertical line and tell D. it will be a letter versus a number, he might guess b, d, h, k, l, or t, but not a, e, or z, etc.
When we started this activity, his guesses were often off, and he would often misname the letter even after it was fully formed. Today, he was enthusiastically participating. He accurately guessed what the letter or number might be, and he named each letter quickly and accurately. Is he shifting his attention to the left side of his brain? Is this working? Has his problem been visual more than auditory? It's been over a year. I have tried everything I know to help this child. Often all I could do was trudge along doing what I knew, hoping that repetition would make a difference. It did, slowly and barely, but it did get better.
A nap was called for after that session, not because it was hard work but because I had slept poorly last night. My alarm went off at 1:20, warning me to get ready for my 1:30 session with J.
I sent out the Zoom invite shortly before 1:30 and texted J. to tell him so. There was no response by 1:35. I called him. Oh, yes. He had forgotten, even though it was he who made sure we had this Friday appointment to make up for our lost time from Tuesday. He signed in quickly.
I spent some time in each session modeling the phonemic analysis. J said it helped him understand more, not just in English but also what his mother says in Spanish. His greatest sorrow is that he has trouble understanding his mother from what he said. The phonemic analysis works to improve auditory processing in all languages. Doing it in English improves his Spanish comprehension; doing it in Spanish will also help improve his English comprehension. We only do a sentence a day. Then we switched to the reading exercise.
We first started with a story over a year behind his current grade level, sixth grade. We spent five or six sessions on that one article. He reported improvement in his reading comprehension of other texts. After finishing that, I bumped him up to the next level, still below grade level. His comprehension was much better. I suggested we work on his current sixth-grade assignments.
Wow! What a difference in the level of difficulty. I don't remember the stories I read being that complex when I was in sixth grade. We work on one paragraph an hour. I teach by chewing language thoroughly. There were many words he didn't know. I have him make logical guesses. The words have to fit in grammatically and logically. I distinguish between a guess that supports the movement of the text versus one that interrupts it. I tell him how close he came and ask him if he wants to know the real meaning. Teaching the real meaning is less important than making a logical guess that supports the story's movement. That is not to say that learning the real meaning isn't important. But each word has a slightly different meaning in each sentence depending on the context. It is important to learn the difference between a word's specific meaning and the general meaning.
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Musings:
I read something about Plato the other day in Stevenson and Habermas's book Ten Theories of Human Nature. Plato believed that people could only achieve true virtue through self-knowledge. I was a little shocked. That has been the way I have approached life. I thought it was an idea I had come to on my own. Of course not. I was spoon-fed Plato by my dad.
My way of expressing it and pursuing it may be my own, but so sorry, dear Betty, this was not an idea you came up with on your own. If that isn't a kick in the pants.
I thought that the only way to overcome a problem was truly understanding it. I knew that football teams studied played games to better understand their opponents' strengths and their weaknesses. Therefore, it was only through understanding myself both as a human being and an individual to become the person I wanted to be.
I also thought of myself as an artist, creating me. A good artist completely understands the materials they are working with. Understanding the limits of that material is what allows the artist their freedom. It's the existential prison: true freedom is understanding the prison you're in and working with that.
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