I stayed in bed when the alarm went off, even though I was up. I just snoozed for a while. I weigh myself every morning. For the last two days, the scale has reported 144 lbs. Where did they come from? I don’t eat that much, except for my chocolates at night. This has to stop. I can’t continue packing on the pounds.
The day was overcast, so it remained cool as I walked. I meditated when I got home. I had a Zoom tutoring meeting with D at 10:30 am. We had trouble connecting the auditory. Everything looked okay on my end, but what do I know? Finally, his mother figured out how to fix the problem.
In our last session, he demonstrated he still had problems recognizing the consonant digraphs sh, ch, and th. Today, I asked him if he thought English had one letter for each sound. He said yes. Good luck! This is English. I told him that while there are twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, there are forty-four sounds. Too many sounds for the letters, so we have to make up other symbols for those sounds. Therefore, we have digraphs.
Good explanation, but only partially true. If we have the letter f to represent the sound /f/, why do we need ph to represent the sound too? How do you explain this nonsense to a child who has trouble remembering as much as D. does? He doesn’t only have trouble with his associative memory, remembering 7 x 9=63; he has a problem with his procedural memory: the steps he has to take to accomplish something, like division or word decoding. I have been covering the procedure for decoding words since last August. I still have to start from scratch. He is not a ‘stupid’ boy. He has a reasonable vocabulary. He does seem to be getting a little better at reading for meaning; he substitutes words that make sense into a sentence when he doesn’t know the word—a step in the right direction, for sure.
After I got off the Zoom with D., Marissa called from Progressive. She was going to introduce me to someone in a managerial position. She has been wonderful. She calls me back promptly, speaks to me with more than just courtesy, gives good explanations, or says she doesn’t know and passes me on to someone who might know better. She arranged for me to speak to a supervisor so I could get the best service. I was connected to Tom, who was an underling. He was going to connect me to his supervisor. He announced that Rob would handle the matter with me.
Rob asked me what I wanted. I told him I wanted to challenge the premium rate. He said I received notification of my rates whenever the policy was renewed. He told me the matter was closed. When I told him I wanted to pursue it, he told me to get a lawyer. It wasn’t just what he said; it was his tone of voice that was suspicious. He sounded temperamental, defensive, and irritable. He didn’t sound like someone in a supervisory position requiring dealing with the public. I asked him if he was the supervisor. He said no; he was a Resolution Consultant. I have some questions about his suitability for this job. I said, “Thank you. Goodbye,” and hung up.
I called Marissa to let her know what had happened. She didn’t get back to me right away, as she usually did. It was during lunch hour. A few hours later, she did call. I told her my experience with Rob. She apologized. She asked me if I wanted to connect with someone right away. I told her that the first fellow I talked to sounded okay except that we got disconnected, and he never called me back. I thought that since he had started the process, he might be better equipped to finish it.
I went down for my midday nap. I do love those naps. Scott called my name as I was waking up. He had bought the fertilizer for my lime tree. He told me how to apply it.
When I did my before-dinner walk, Mariana, a neighbor, drove past. She was on her way to Matsuyama’s to buy a tub of ice cream. She sells coffee from her farm out of her car at Costco. I see her car there, but often not her. She’s got the seat leaning way back, and she’s snoozing, waiting for her customers to come by. I asked her how she managed to tolerate the heat during the day. She said, Oh, she’s used to it.
Marianna always has a great smile on her face. It was a delight to speak to someone who smiled at me. My facial muscles are forgetting how to smile. I bet it makes me look a good ten years older. Given how I am doing with the lack of social stimulation, I can only imagine how it is for others who are isolated than I am. I also feel more empathy for those confined in prison cells with a lack of physical and social stimulation. I have been limiting my walks to the road I live on lately. I think I’m going to have to mix it up, so I have more visual stimulation. Of course, I’m limiting it because of the physical problems I’m having. I may have to wait until they clear up. How much of this limitation can I still overcome?
Dorothy recommended a new mystery series, The Frankie Drake Mysteries. I didn’t find it very satisfying. A little too lightweight.
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Musings.
This one is about perception in the context of education, a subject that fascinates me.
In the reading profession, the big debate has been whether we recognize a word as a whole or break it down as we read it. Competent readers experience reading as something that happens without needing to analyze each word. We have complete knowledge of the word after a brief glimpse. Obviously, we are not doing a laborious analysis of the word. However, when we describe our experience when reading that way, we only describe what our conscious minds are doing.
Our nonconscious minds do a very detailed analysis of everything we see in split-second timing, once we have trained them to do their job. That training can be labor-intensive and hard work. It entails forcing neurons that are asleep to wake up and perform their intended function, connecting with other neurons.
The conscious mind gets an easy ride once the unconscious mind is adequately trained. The unconscious mind breaks down perception into minute details: the curved lines versus the straight ones, the tall ones versus the short ones. After the neurons send their specific information to the right place, something combines all that information into a whole again. That reconstituted image is what the conscious mind gets to see and then claims it did all the work. Not. Automatic processing does not become automatic automatically. It always takes some conscious input. For some, that learning phase is short; for others, it is long; for others, it is very long. This is related to the development of our brains. There are multiple causes.
