Saturday, July 3, 2021

 Saturday, July 3, 2021

            

            I had told Tommy, my tech, to use the video as it was recorded. He was planning to use my Zoom audio and visual and screenshots of the slides. I asked him not to do that because I made changes to some slides as I presented them. This morning it occurred to me this wasn't true for all the slides. I emailed him offering to indicate the slides that could not be simply screenshots. He acknowledged getting my email but didn't respond.

            Adolescent D's mother arranged for me to do an extra session this week. We have been doing M-Th skipping Friday and the weekend. I signed on at 10:am. There was no response. I called his mom. She didn't answer. I called D. After a short delay, he answered. I suspected he had just woken up. No, his mother hadn't told him she scheduled this extra session. I asked him what he wanted to do; it was okay if he wanted to cancel. He responded, "I don't know," his default response to everything. I told him, "I don't know," was not a choice. He could cancel, he could do it immediately, or he could do it in half an hour. He chose to do it at 10:30.  

            I started with the BrainManagementSkills (BMS). I asked him about the colors on both sides of his brain. The left was white- a pretty white. The right side was red – a pretty red. Pretty is good. It means the person is comfortable with that state of his mind.  

            I taught him the Neurolinguistic Programming activity, holding a word in his head and saying the letters forward and backward. He did this activity with ease. We read the sight word sentences, the ones I created comparing two words the student confuses. "Her book is over here," I told him to focus on the letters and ask his unconscious mind to do this. Also, to wait until his mind told him what the word was. He did it and declared, "This is weird!" Great!!! Could you want a better response? Weird means it is unfamiliar. His brain was doing something it hadn't done before. If he continued doing it, the sensation would become so familiar that he wouldn't be aware of it anymore.   Today was the first time I felt adolescent D was working with me as a teammate. Up to now, my role has been more like a slave driver, forcing him to do things. I made modifications to accommodate his ego, but I always had to deal with resistance or passivity. Today, he was working on simple sentences with repeated words, and he wasn't complaining. I told him he was not working on learning the words right now. He was working on building up the parts of the brain he needed to recognize words easily. 

       I got an email from Step Up Tutoring tutors. Step Up Tutoring is an online tutoring program in LA, CA. Damon, my step-son, came across an ad; they were looking for volunteer tutors. I am only working with one student, a sixth-grade boy whose parents speak no English. I put together a video demonstrating my method of teaching phonics. Teaching traditional phonics, an Orton-Gillingham program, requires a lot of training. As teachers teach phonics in classrooms, they present prepared lessons. Unfortunately, very few have any idea of what it's about. Yes, they understand that the letters sh represent the /sh/ sound, and that's worthwhile knowing, but little beyond that. The method I use allows students and teachers to discover the phonics of the English language, actually any alphabetic language. It's so much fun, but it involves intellectual risk-taking. Intellectual risking taking is something students have to learn, and traditional teaching avoids. 

       Besides tutoring this one student, I volunteered to offer help to the tutors who wanted help in teaching reading. I have reading office hours one day a week. The following email is from a tutor who participated in one of those sessions. I have shared my methods with others, but this is the first person who ever gave me feedback, telling me not only that she used it but that it worked. Yikes! 

 

On Thu, Jul 1, 2021, at 2:21 pm, R C <rc@stepuptutoring.org> wrote:

Hi Betty,

 

Thank you so much for speed-coaching us newbies on reading instruction. This is truly a trial-by-fire kind of situation for me! 

 

My rising 4th grader is doing great. It's been awkward for her to think in terms of phonemes, but I do think it's working. She's getting the hang of spelling first, then sounding out challenging words. Today I asked her to spell phonemes (e.g., in Martian or Egyptian), and I could tell a light went on suddenly when she figured out ti = sh. That took almost the entire session...

 

I take so much for granted!

 

Anyway, I appreciate your help very much. It made all the difference. She's improved from N to O to P reading level as of today!

 

All the best,

Rachel

            At 2 pm, I had a facial with Collen Porter scheduled. I have one once every six months or so. She is amazing. I think she is something like a medical cosmetologist, or is it an aesthetician? Whatever her label, she gives the best facials ever. 

            Collen used to own a house in my neighborhood. She and her husband built it. She told stories about the old neighborhood. They had block parties. They also had problems with the folks that lived next door to us.  

            When we bought our property, the property next door was a mess. Yvette and Josh were living here already while someone was living there. There were major fights, and the guy yelled at the kids nonstop. Then the mother of the children left, and he moved into town with a girlfriend. 

      The history of the house is something else. The property belonged to a Hawaiian family, L and M. M had another family on Maui and traveled back and forth. Someone's 300 lbs. sister lived in the house, bedridden. She died because she choked on something like a nut. L and M either adopted J or gave the house to M's sister, who adopted J. J as a piece of work. Collen said she would find him in their hot tub or jumping on their trampoline without permission. Worse yet, J would wander the neighborhood, check out who was out, and rob the house. He did it to several people. People came to the adults and said that they would kill him if he came on their property again. That seemed to do the trick. J argued he had a right to take what he wanted because he was a native Hawaiian, and everything on the island belonged to him. Good try, no cigar. He wandered in and out of jail. Colleen didn't know his fate. 

            Eventually, the house ended with the last owner in that line, the abusive J. He sold it to Elizabeth and Ronan, who cleaned the place up. Ronan turned it into a working farm. He sold 150 lbs. of lettuce to the restaurants in town every week. Then Covid hit. He let the land go fallow and sold. Our new neighbors are a delight. We are so lucky. My home would be easy to break into. It's never completely locked. Even if it were, all someone would have to do is cut a screen, and they would be in like Flynn.