Monday, November 22, 2021
I get tired around 9 pm every night. I try to stay up a little longer, concerned I’ll wake too early in the morning. I sleep very well till 3:30 or 4. That’s after six and a half or seven hours of sleep. Then staying asleep often becomes a struggle. You’d think I had the common sense to get up, get dressed, and get in my chair to meditate, but no. I struggle to go back to sleep. I try to meditate while in bed. It’s much harder than when sitting upright. I dozed off. That’s okay. However, during those early morning hours, disturbing thoughts enter my mind, which can throw me off for the rest of the day. After the Sunday NPR shows on meditation, I did much better. It’s like NPR knew what I needed. Sometimes, I can fall down the rabbit hole.
Monday, I had my Reading Office hours. Four tutors from the Step Up Tutoring problem were scheduled. Only three showed up. The first was an older man who had a third grader with attention problems. He even had problems paying attention while playing a game. I thought that sounded like an anxiety disorder. I suggested doing a meditation exercise. See how long they could sit without moving anything, not even a finger or a toe. I told him to ask the child how he felt afterward. I remembered sitting still actually hurt. My muscles spasmed. This problem continued until I started meditating. I completed 10-day silent retreats where I had to sit without moving for 45-minutes. I had to build up to that.
Another woman came on and described her student as having pronunciation problems. The student came from a Latino background. At first, the girl denied she even spoke Spanish. That sounded like a shame issue. It also sounded like the tutor had already made some progress in this area. The tutor told her she didn’t speak Spanish very well, which helped the student feel her Spanish was valuable. The child then admitted she knew Spanish and helped the tutor with it. This woman really had no idea what her problem with reading was. She gave scattered pieces of information, which made it difficult to get a complete picture. She said she pronounced the vowel letters with a Spanish accent. It sounded like the student didn’t understand that a single letter in English could represent different pronunciations. The letter A has eight phonically regular ways to be pronounced. I showed the tutor the list from the Phase I video. She asked, “How can someone learn the difference?” I showed her the rules for each of the eight pronunciations. “You wouldn’t teach a student those rules.” In fact, yes. They are explicitly taught. Finally, it came out that the student could read big words like transition but made all sorts of mistakes on smaller words. We finally got down to what the problem might be about. This is the most lost tutor I’ve seen so far. She has no idea what to expect and what the student might need help with. The student’s accent was the least of her problems.
I ran my lecture on the importance of not pushing a change in accent because it teaches the students that they can only learn to read once they speak English correctly. Their knowledge is not good enough. The other participant spoke with a foreign accent and chimed in to confirm what I said.
I did some gardening before I took a shower in preparation for tonight’s dinner guests. I worked on cutting down the blown heliconia. They have to be cut back, or they look pretty skuzzy.
I had adolescent D at 4:30. I asked him if he thought he hadn’t read a word if he had to figure it out, decode it? Yes. Oh, boy. This means he thinks reading is automatically knowing what a world is. If he focused on automaticity as his goal and avoided conscious processing, he would never be a good reader.
I used his experience with knot tying in the Boy Scouts. If he had to tie the knot slowly, thinking about every move, in the end, was the knot tied? Had he tied the knot? I explained the difference between conscious processing and automatic processing. While doing something automatically may be a goal, we can still say that we did something even if we had to think about it every step of the way. Good learners know when to use conscious processing versus automatic and how to get conscious processing to become automatic.
A while ago, he said that there has been no improvement in his reading. He was always able to do what he could do now. He was able to read some words automatically, maybe 200 words. Even then, it wouldn’t have been all the words on any one sight word list. He tested on the first-grade level. When I started working with him, he still confused the words her and here, and he couldn’t remember the word they from one minute to the next. I asked him if he thought the only difference between what he did before and now is he knew more words. I didn’t dare try him on lower-level work to see how he did. I could face his continuing inadequacies; I was concerned he couldn’t. He could decode most of the words in the eighth-grade passage we read. It just took him forever – if he used an adequate decoding procedure. I have certainly taught him one that works, but he tends to not use it. Drives me nuts. This confirms a theory that some students do the same thing D does; he refuses to decode because that’s not reading. OW!
Today, I finally started announcing my completed videos to the world. I posted the announcement I created on FaceBook. I wanted to start posting it to everyone on my email list. I couldn’t find an address book on Yahoo. There used to be a link listed on the Yahoo site. If there still is one, I couldn’t find it. I did send it to three teachers that came to mind from Licking Heights, my last teaching job before I retired and moved to Hawaii. I also tracked down an old principal who taught me a lot about myself as a teacher. He was the one who told me that it was unusual for someone like me to say working with students. Usually, they left the classroom and went to teach at the college level and do research. I did and do research and develop new ideas. I just don’t do it under the auspicious of a university. I didn’t want those limits. I develop my ideas in response to my students’ needs. In doing so, I often come up with something new. I’m good at that; I’m an effective teacher.
When I Googled the name of my old principal, the first thing that came up was an article. He and his son had been in a car accident where the boy was killed, and my old principal had spent time in the hospital. He was listed as the current principal, but I didn’t know if that was valid. I should call the school. I sent him a personal email expressing my condolences, thanking him for sharing his insights about me and sending the blurb with information about the videos.
Watching all those videos with Fosse’s choreography made me want to dance. I thought I could make those moves. I chose the finale from the 2002 film Chicago. That choreography wasn’t Fosse’s; it was Rob Marshall’s, but based on Fosse’s vocabulary. A modification was necessary because neither of the lead actresses was a professional dancer. Zeta-Jones had a background in musicals; Zellweger had only been a cheerleader. I love the way she moves. I set my computer up on my bed and tried to copy the moves. I had trouble on the first eight counts. I was shocked at how limited my movement range was. I could easily have made those moves even in my forties. I tried again. I was better on the second try. I hope I can stick with it, slowly building coordination and range of motion. I don’t ever hope to look like either of those women. They were in their prime when they did the movie. I checked. They were both thirty-three.
Yvette and her friend Scott came up for dinner. Yvette brought a vegetarian pie made by a friend in Hilo. She had been over there for a yoga class with her friend, Jennifer. Scott bought a small bag of sweet kale salad, my favorite. The shepherd’s pie was surprisingly good, well-seasoned.
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