Tuesday, February 16, 2021

 Tuesday, February 16, 2021

 

    I talked to Dorothy briefly this morning; Tuesday is her online yoga class. I remembered a dream I had. A family friend had come to visit me in Hawaii. He looked out at the Pacific from my lanai and made some negative comments about the view. I told him he had to follow the house rule, “You can only make one negative comment after making four positive ones.” He asked, “What if I have nothing positive to say?” “Say nothing.” 

     Other than that, my day was productive. I completed the request for evaluation form for D, dropped mine off at the school, and delivered blank forms for his evaluation and copies of D’s stories to his mom, who filled them out immediately and handed them in. Then I went to Target to buy more Milk-Bone pill pouches and an ear-wash for Elsa. I found the pill pouches but no ear wash. Because she had problems, I had to think of washing out her ears every few days. I headed over to Petco. They had only puny bottles at hefty costs. Forget that. My next stop was Safeway. I pulled into the old Safeway lot again, forgetting they had relocated to their new and improved facility on the other side of queen K. Yvette said she is avoiding Safeway and only shopping at KTA, a local company. I’ve never been to the Kona KTA. I remember Mike wanting to shop there and saying he did find their selection as good as Safeway’s. I have to get myself over that speed bump and try for myself. 

     Today, I went to Safeway. First, I was looking for David’s whole grain bread. I saw the bakery section where things were fresh baked but not the commercial products. I asked the lady behind the counter. I heard her say, “Outside.” Well, that was a surprise. I said, “Outside??” She had to lower her mask and repeat, “Aisle five.” Besides the bread, I picked up some chicken legs and salad. I will make it to Costco for the giant economy-sized salad sometime this week. This will tide me over. When I went to pay, by metal ‘wallet’ holding all my credit cards was nowhere to be found. I can remember a time in my life I would have flown into a panic, abandoned my purchases, and started off in a dead run looking for the missing wallet.’ That I don’t is thanks to Mike and fifty years of therapy. I offered my other credit card and said my search would start in my car. Fortunately, the first place I looked was in the shopping bag where I dumped all my Target purchases. Sure enough, I had thrown it in there. I am grateful every day for Mike’s constant reminder, “It’s just a problem to be solved.” We have to save the panic for things worth panicking about, like an immediate physical threat, situations where we need the rush of adrenaline to escape our fate. Those situations are few and far between for anyone; they have never been real for me.  

       Then off to the post office to mail a stack of records to my nephew-in-law. I found someone interested in at least some of the records left after Mike gave most of them away – without consulting me first. He had his moments. Some of the records he gave away were ones I bought when I was in high school in the fifties. There are four or five original Beatles albums I purchased in the sixties. I have no idea if they are still playable. 

       When the clerk weighed the package, he said, “$56.00.” Gulp! “I said can they be sent media? They’re records.” He said, “No, they have to be copyrighted.” Hmm! “They’re vinyl records.” “Oh! $ 8. 60, but it may take them 6 weeks to get there.” Okay. I also mailed a bottle of MakesNoClaims to Damon. In our last conversation, he told me he has been suffering from some sort of skin problem for the last two years. He told me all the lotions he had tried. I said, “Why don’t you try MNCs?” He ignored my comment. I repeated it. He ignored me again and mentioned some highly toxic medicine he is trying to avoid taking. “Why not try MNCs?” He finally conceded. I have been recommending it for years before he was married, and his son is now 17.  

     MakesNoClaims is a unique clay that is infused with some sound vibrations. Its real name is Intrasound. It got it MakesNoClaims name from Damon, well, sort of. He read the jar and said, “It says it makes no claims. Ha! Ha!” meaning it was obviously useless. I dubbed the product MakesNoClaims, and that’s the name the whole family knows it. 

       Recently Dorothy suffered from an annoying skin tag. She was another reluctant family member. Finally, I got her to try it. She reported that it made no difference after a few days. Then the next week, she called and said, “It fell off.” Yep. I have no idea how the stuff works, but it does. You can find the supplier online.

     When I got home, I did some more work on the PowerPoint. It is hard to know what to include and what to leave out. I have been using this approach to teach phonics for more than twenty-five years. I have developed all these ways of responding when kids don’t get it. With one kid, I’ll do one thing and with another something different. How do I share all my responses without flooding my audience?

    I contacted Brian, my go-to computer guy. He said he could come by in the afternoon. Unfortunately, the afternoon for him meant a little after 2:30. I had appointments starting at 3:30 and some prep to do. I had to resend the Carpenter stories I was using with A. I have to do this every time I work with him. I can’t find documents on the tablet. Maddening.

          At 3, I had A. He was reading the material I gave him more quickly and accurately. I struggled with him today to get him to slow down on a blending activity. I had to tell him I understood how he wanted to have the sounds he produced make sense and achieve the blend quickly. However, he would have to slow down if he wanted to speed up one day. He responded. He had to blend ow-n, a part of Brown. Those sounds had no meaning in isolation. He did slow down and became more deliberate. 

       Before the session started, I asked him some questions. Was he doing better? He didn’t answer my question appropriately. It is hard to know how much is an auditory processing problem versus a general cognitive one. Besides the inappropriate answers he gave me, he had another problem. He had to read the word four. The sentence before told us that Taddy was a little boy. The next sentence was, “He was four.” I told him to just say the /f/ and the /r/, blending them. Nothing. I told him the word was a number. Nothing. I asked him which number he thought “four” sounded like, only pronouncing the f and the r. I said the numbers one through 9. He said nine. He may have tried to figure out the answer from what he thought made sense and ignored the phonemic information.

     I called his mom later in the afternoon. She said she has seen significant improvement in him in just a few sessions. We had our fourth today. I would say he had made 100% improvement. Meaning he is 100% better than he was. He was very low Kindergarten level; he is now one level higher, still Kindergarten, but given he hadn’t made this much progress in the last two years of school, I think we have to assume we have a winning program here. 

      His mom also told me that he had severe earaches as a young child. They had to put tubes in his ears. Ear infections are associated with learning disabilities. I have two students with a history of ear infections now.

      After A, I had J. His 4th-grade sister was in the room and participated. J said he wanted to work on math and the “whatdoyoucallit,” referring to the phonemic awareness exercises. He and his sister worked together. For kids, this work is a form of play. It was a three-word sentence. Ju, the sister, worked on the word looked. She gave a pronunciation for the double oo from moon. Now, she might say the word that way using a Spanish accent. I said what I always say when children give a different pronunciation from mine. “If that’s the way you say the word, you are right. If you don’t, you’re not.” I pronounced it was the oo from moon and the oo from book. She said she pronounced it as I did. Those two played with the sounds for a good half hour. I’m hoping they will play together without me. Both will see improvement in their word recognition skills.