Wednesday, January 6, 2021
I was up by 5:30 this morning, even though yoga was canceled. I spent a good part of the day working on the PowerPoint on my decoding method for the Step-Up Tutoring Program while listening to the accounts of the events at our country's capital. Nothing surprising. Many have been expecting this since the day he, Trump. won the election in 2016. I have friends who do not believe Trump incited these actions. I don't dare ask what they think. I have heard that some believe the 'protesters' are from the left, Antifa, instead of really Trump supporters. These are crazy-making times.
Yesterday, Yvette told me that the infrared lamp people advise using it three times a day for at least 10 minutes and no more than 30.
I had a tutoring appointment with D. this morning. He signed on late because his mom had forgotten about me. She is making noises about doing everything she can to support my work with him. We are seeing some improvement.
Today he said he wanted to work on the math, memorizing the multiplication facts. He wasn't even close to getting the correct answer on the ones we have worked on over and over again. He has serious memory problems.
Again, I showed him a possible route through the brain for recalling facts. The eye sees the problems, 9 x4=; the information is embedded in visual working memory; we ask our mind for the answer, and it delivers it just as if someone whispered it in our ears. I started with his visual working memory. No, he couldn't visualize the numbers. That's a problem right there. I have no idea how to help him. I asked him what color his own blanket was. He had no problem with that one; he was lying in his own bed and looking right at it. I asked him what color his mother's blanket was. He wasn't sure; she had just gotten a new one. I asked him to remember the old one with a blue and white pattern, but he didn't have a clear image. I asked him to visualize anything. He saw his cat, Cosmo, sitting in front of him, looking at him. Okay, let's try using Cosmo to get the answers. I tried to teach "Cosmo' the math and have him give the answers to D. Well, that didn't work. Cosmo didn't do any better with the math facts than D did.
He wrote the number nine- backward. Still?? OMG! Using Dahaene's information on how the brain works, I showed him how visual information is received by the left and right primary visual cortex. I wrote the number 3 correctly on the left and backward on the right. I asked him if he saw both. He said yes. Dahaene wrote that some people who appear dyslexic have not settled their information on the brain's left side. He knows he vastly prefers what he gets from the right side of the brain. I think we may be on to something here. There are two questions: Why does he prefer the right side so much over the left? Can we get him to use the right side to his benefit and allow the left to work where it must do its job? I took a break and washed my kitchen floor and my second infrared treatment for the day.
I did more work on the PowerPoint. Every time I look at it, I see something I can do to make it clearer. Will this process ever end? Then I had an appointment with M at 2 pm.
I made it her choice: did she want to work on writing or something she was doing for school? She said she wanted to work on inferencing. I hadn't sent her material so we could read it together. Just as well. I have a series of workbooks dedicated to different reading comprehension skills. Coincidentally, this series was created by my sister-in-law's fifth-grade teacher. I grabbed a handful of 'Using Context Clues' books, third grade through eighth. I started with the first unit in the third-grade book. If it was easy for her, we could move on to more challenging material.
Wow! Some of the texts were a surprise, and I was stumbling as I read them to her. The first was about a building built to look like an elephant. You entered through one of the legs and climbed up through the stomach to reach the head. I experienced some cognitive dissonance as I read the paragraph. Also, I hadn't thought through how I would present the choices provided in the book to her. Just as well, it slowed the process down.
She drew a picture of an elephant to represent the building with a pathway showing how people entered through the leg, walked through the stomach, and arrived at the head to look out of the eye at a view of the ocean. She also wrote all the choices. I know. I thought, "What? Why don't you know the answer? This is easy." Fortunately, I could keep myself calm and keep my mouth shut. Yes, she had to respond more quickly, but I had to wait until it felt right to push her to the next step. For the first two paragraphs, she drew a picture and wrote all the choices. By the fourth, she felt comfortable giving an answer without going through all that. At the third-grade level, the wrong answers are pretty obvious. Although there were two that were tricky. I could show her how it was one rather than the other because of the language that preceded the blank space. I confess I was surprised by how much difficulty she had with this exercise. I wrote her mom that she was right about pushing me to do this work with her daughter.
Yvette and Scott stopped up. Yvette and I have been talking about the problems we have been having with unsteady Internet connections. Yvette does yoga classes online through Zoom. She often has her voice muffled by buffering. I sometimes find my connection breaks up too. The other issue under discussion was our combining our Internet account. Yvette said Josh had checked, and someone told her that we couldn't do it because we were two separate households. I called today and explained that we were one family. She just asked me for the relevant information to cancel my account. Huh? This was so easy; it was like slipping on ice. I needed more information.
The other issue was the thickness of the cable coming into our house. Scott said he has seen thicker ones elsewhere. There is a possibility that increased thickness is because of thicker insulation, so the wire doesn't break down; it doesn't provide more bandwidth. It would cost $50 just to have a tech come out and check. No, no, no. Let's think about this.
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Musings:
Interesting facts: Despite today's high divorce rate, most marriages last longer than they did in colonial times. Marriages were terminated primarily by death in those days.
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