Monday, August 23, 2021

Monday, August 23, 2021

 

    As I woke this morning, I thought of the video. That terrible feeling came over me. I didn’t know what the emotion was, but it was as if an electric current was running through my chest, shoulders, and arms. It feels as if every cell is jumping up and down. It’s not a great feeling. I figured out a pathway to resolving this issue with the video. I had to go over each slide and note the points I made. I could reorganize the order of the slides and remake some of them so they show a progression and don’t repeat the same information. When I got up and moved, the weird sensations stopped. 

     I had sixth grade D this morning at 8:30. The difference in his reading from when we started is stunning. My method works; it’s still a disconcerting process; expectations are overthrown. I started the session by telling him what I knew about occurrences of the diphthongs, ah, aw, ay, etc. After teaching him that aw always made one sound yesterday, we promptly ran into the word away. I realized that even if he had divided the word as aw/ay instead of a/way and pronounced the word with the /aw/ sound, he could have figured the word out. Second, the letter combination aw is more frequently a digraph than two distinct sounds and usually occurs at the end of a word or in the middle, not in the beginning. Statistics again- vital for reading English. Then he read the text and knocked it out of the park. 

     I saved the last ten minutes for working on his writing. He had generated an idea about his six-year-old brother and him body surfing. I thought it was quite a challenge to describe this. I tried to think of how to write this myself. I resolved to have him think of a sensory image and put that into words. He talked about waiting for the waves. He dictated the following with little to no input from me. I typed as fast as I could. This is without editing.

    

 The ones we pass are just little lumps in the water. They’re barely starting to form. At the beach, I’m thinking about right now rough waves and most likely there’s a decent-sized wave but they form at different points in the water.

 

At the moment, me and my brother we were waiting at the calm waves break-line, waiting for the not too big and not too small wave so we could look for an incoming wave. When we saw a good wave, we would get in position so that we could get ready to pull up as soon as the wave started to barrel. 

 

      At one point, he said something and told me not to write it yet. I told him this is what I should be writing. He could take out what he liked when he edited. First, get your ideas down. Just throw out everything that comes to mind. He did much better than I thought he was going to do. I looked forward to seeing what he would produce.  

      Over the weekend, I wrote to sixth-grade D’s mom to cancel next Friday because my nephew David is getting married. She told me D, and I wouldn’t be meeting on Fridays anymore. She has another activity scheduled for her children for that day.

      At 11 am I had my reading office hours. I had only one person requesting assistance. She was assigned to a fourth-grade girl from an immigrant family. Her mother said she had problems with reading. I said, given her grade, her problems were probably with word recognition rather than comprehension. Not that she didn’t also have problems with comprehension. I showed her Phase I with the Phonics Discovery System. I told her it was easy to learn but took nerve. She said she was a good candidate. I assured her she would make mistakes; I still made mistakes. She was good with that. She understood the value of modeling making errors and coping with it for students. Teachers must model the learning process, which requires making mistakes and learning from them.  

    I texted my friend in LA with an alternative to selling his current house to this tech who sold his company to Facebook for $30,000,000. Since the guy was only planning to use the house a few months out of the year, rent it to him. However, charge him enough to cover two months of mortgage plus payments and the rent for a beach house while he’s here. Sounds like a win-win to me. 

     I had adolescent D. at 4:30 pm. I always ask him about his day, particularly any reading he did in school. He attended a summer program. They gifted him ten books. I asked him if any of them interested him. He said no. I can’t blame him. He’s fourteen and should be starting high school; the books are on third- and fourth-grade levels. If they were non-fiction, that would be one thing, but their fiction. They’re about nine-year-old children. 

     I’ve been pushing him to tell me something he might be interested in reading, like the driver’s manual in preparation for the written driver’s test. “I don’t know.” He’s good with the weak water answers. Nothing is quite right. I was shocked when he declared that he saw his reading was better. 

    D is a perfectionist. He’s angry at himself. I asked him if he thought he was a bad person. He said yes. Had he harmed anyone? He said maybe his sister. I spent the rest of the session informing him of the human condition. A) no one gets away without making mistakes. B) no one gets away without being angry at someone, C) and no one gets away without hurting people. We have to learn to live with our limitations and forgive ourselves. If we don’t, we either take it out on ourselves or blame others for our problems.  

   I asked him if he wanted to change his perfectionist bent. He said yes. I asked how much on a rate of 1-10. He said 100. He fell asleep at the end of our session. Certainly not his fault- or not the fault of his conscious mind. I’m not sure of the meaning of his checking out. Either way, it’s too much for his conscious mind to deal with. Is his mind saying, “Get out of here!” or is it saying, “I need to process this information in a deep way?” Either way, this boy has opened himself up. I feel honored that he trusts me enough to consider letting me help him change. Now to find a way to do it that is helpful. “Lord, let me do no harm!”

     My Bose radio, which I listen to almost continuously, started making these weird gurgling noises. I changed the station. It still had that effect. Different channels use different transmission towers. If there is a disturbance, it usually disappears when I change channels. I’ve had this radio for years. I was still surprised that the Bose failed.

     I was tired after my before-dinner walk, and I suddenly felt dizzy and somewhat nauseous. I lay down for a while. My stomach was sufficiently upset that the thought of chocolate left me feeling worse instead of better. I spent the evening binging on YouTube videos, particularly several about Martha Graham, waiting for my appetite to return. I didn’t. I finally went to bed, hoping I would feel better in the morning. I wondered if I had a more serious problem than a simple vertigo attack with an upset stomach. When I was young, I had pregnancy scares. Now that I’m old, I worry about signs of the end of life. Note: I was a virgin when I had my first pregnancy scare. What can I tell you? I had a vivid imagination.