Tuesday, January 19, 2021
I called my financial advisor this morning at Raymond James. I have some significant expenses coming up: I am expanding the solar system and having a stem cell transplant for my hips. Since both these companies will let me put everything on my credit cards, that’s the plan. I want to collect those hefty reward points. I asked Laura from Raymond James if they could pay it off the moment amounts cleared so I could complete payment in a matter of days instead of months. My credit line isn’t that great. I never run up much of a bill. You get a bad credit rating if you are financially conservative. It would take several charges to complete the payment for these two services. Laura said yes and then remembered that I could do this myself. I had to arrange direct payment from my checking account to the card. I spent the morning paying off what was on the card at the time.
As I waited for the solar company representative to arrive to go over the contract, I did some work on the PowerPoint presentation on my reading method. I am trying to practice it several times a day so it flows smoothly. Of course, as I go over it, I make changes. Dorothy and I will have a job and a half to make sure all the various editions are collated. I will have to have both my computers on, one with the PP and one with the script. Dorothy will have the PP on her laptop as we read each slide and decide which expresses the ideas best.
The Sears repairment was scheduled to arrive today. Sears had already written off Mike’s stovetop and offered me a replacement. Only one problem, it wasn’t a replacement for what I had. If they carried the model he bought, I could have put the money they were willing to spend on the replacement and made up the difference. Mike and I did that with a refrigerator we had to replace.
I convinced Sears to take another look at the stovetop. I told them that I hired a Kitchen Aid repairman privately, and he diagnosed a problem that had not been detected by the Sears’s repairman. I got the list of replacement parts Sears had provided and the parts Convey requested. They were not the same. Convey saw a problem the Sears guys hadn’t noticed. The man who came today could see the difference in the lists. He ordered the items on Convey’s list and arranged to come back on the 5th to install them. Hopefully, this will work.
I had a 2:30 appointment with J. He said he wanted to work on reading. As he brought up his classroom screen searching for the reading material, I caught a glimpse of the word “overdue.” I asked him about it. He said it was a math sheet, but it wasn’t online. It was on paper. I said, “Show me the problems.”
It took him forever to write them down. I couldn’t imagine what would take so long. When it finally came on the Zoom shared screen, I understood; he was typing out a word problem. Wow! There’s been a great improvement in word problems. When I was a kid, all the problems used the same operation: all division, all multiplication, etc. There were three different questions on this word problem. J’s problems had three different questions for each set of information, requiring multiple operations and whole numbers versus fractions. J had a great deal of difficulty thinking this through. As we started working on these problems, he also had problems remembering his multiplication facts and understanding fractions. I proposed working on those two problems since they are fundamental. J asked if we could work on the next time. He wanted to get this assignment done.
Besides the problems with multiple operations, there was one problem where he had to match types of measurements to objects: ‘cubic’ to volume and ‘squared’ to area or space to linear numbers. He had no idea. He didn’t know how big an inch was, no less the metric measurements; neither did he know the significance of cubing or squaring. Wow! he said he was okay in math. No, no, no. He has been in the US school system since K. He was born in this country. I’m not sure why he’s missed so much content. I can’t believe he wasn’t paying attention. This may tie into his auditory processing problem. Or it may be that he doesn’t know how to move back and forth between concrete and abstract thinking. I have found that immigrant students often think the only way to learn something is to memorize what the teacher says. They don’t understand their role as self-learners/teachers. They see themselves as passive recipients of knowledge.
Jean, my hanai sister, called while I was working with J. I called her back. We don’t speak often. When we do, it is always satisfying. We cover a wide range of topics, both personal and abstract. Jean’s politics are pretty far to the left. She thinks the pull to the right is all by people who don’t earn enough money to live comfortable lives. If their economic situation was better, they wouldn’t be as angry. I disabused her of that notion. Some perfectly well-off people enthusiastically support Trump. Some support single-issues, some argue for a society based solely on meritocracy, some believe Trump is a harbinger of the rapture, and some are fulfilling the promise their ancestors made after the end of the Civil War, “Th e south will rise again.” Economic disparity and availability of decent jobs may be some of the problems, but it is certainly not the sum total.
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