Tuesday, June 8, 2021

 Tuesday, June 8, 2021

 

            As I walk Elsa, if she poops near the house, I will throw the poop-filled bag on the verge to be picked up on my way back home. Last night, as I walked with Kelly, Bailey’s human, I passed the spot where I had dropped a bag. I planned to pick it up in the morning.       As I opened the side door to go out into the driveway for my morning walk, I saw something lying in the driveway. When I got out there, I saw it was one of my poopy bags. However, while this bag had no poop in it, it did have a poop smear. It had had poop in it. Da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da. 

            As I continued on my walk, I ran into Kelly and Bailey again. I asked her if she had picked up my dropped poopy bag and delivered it into my driveway. No, she was looking for it as she was walking. Weird and then weirder. Was this Mike at work again? In this case, I think he was just having a good laugh.

            I had an appointment with K this morning. The plan is for me to work with him once a week and his twin sisters on another day. I continued working with him on writing his name. He wrote his first name correctly. He remembered all the letters and wrote them in the correct order. He also recalled his last name and wrote that correctly. No, it wasn’t perfect. He miswrote the lower-case g. He got the curve in the right direction but put the tail up instead of down. Also, the t,s,o, and n in his name were all the same size. When I told him the problem, he erased the g he had written and rewrote it correctly.

            Then I asked him what his birthday was. He didn’t have a clue. I cued the name by saying Oc; he got October from that. Then without my asking, he wrote the word. I was pretty impressed. I called his mom to come in and look. Her only comment was he was missing the e in October, not one positive comment. Excuse me. I have to talk with this woman.

            When I worked with adolescent D, he read the whole paragraph we’ve been rereading in every session. He got stuck on the word silence again, and I had to lead him step by step in the decoding procedure. He struggles with his memory. He really can’t remember anything easily. This is an uncomfortable handicap. Mine is still good enough to joke about walking into a room and having no memory of why I went there. All my contemporaries are telling similar stories. We are assured that this is part of normal aging and not a sign of a more serious dementia problem.

Tommy, my techie, completed the audio file of the stories read with phonemic breakdown. He posted it on a private Facebook page before uploading it to YouTube. As I reviewed the slides, I saw I said nothing about this helping reading or English language learners. Oh, well. Maybe someone will find it on their own.

            I told Tommy about the stats on my public blog. I sometimes have over a hundred people signing in on a single day. Often these large numbers are from folks in Turkey of all places. Tommy had the same thought I did; it sounded like some teacher in Turkey had assigned my blog for reading. It may be for an English language course. I cover a range of topics; it’s a good way to learn vocabulary. I remember working with a Somali seventh-grader. Her English was flawless, but she didn’t know what fog was. Well, she wouldn’t. Her family would discuss the weather in their native language in her home. What I didn’t cover in the blog was cooking, cleaning, and childcare.