Thursday, September 2, 2021

Thursday, September 2, 2021

 

    I was up before the alarm went off. On my walk this morning, I ran into another early morning walker who seemed friendly but with whom I thought I had never exchanged information. Today, I stopped him and asked his name. Tom. Then he said something about lightning. I didn't remember lightning last night. He said it was a reference to a previous conversation we had that I didn't remember. It was about me sheltering Elsa during storms. My guess is I had asked his name before too. Oh, well.

    Someone on the radio talked about the importance of having contact with strangers. It is this quality in humans that allows for community building. We have to find a way to relate to people we barely know. Between the Internet and Covid, there is a concern we are losing this ability.

   I finally got a phone call from the mother of the two girls with dyslexia Judy had told me about. Judy used to tutor the learning disabled when she lived on Oahu. She was trained in Orton-Gillingham. A woman she had worked with contacted Judy to ask her if she knew someone. Judy referred me.  

    One of the girls is ten and in fifth grade. The other is seven and is repeating first grade. Judy told me the woman who worked with them on Oahu is strict Orton-Gillingham. She went through the training with this woman. She struck the other participants in the class as a rigid thinker. My teaching style would be quite a change for the girls. I told the mother that while I was trained in OG, I didn't use it in its original form. I wondered how she and the girls would respond. We made appointments for both girls. I told her I only did half an hour at a time. I found that a better timing for the students as well as me. I would work with one of the girls at 4 pm and the other at 4:30 pm.

   The serviceman from Provision solar called to tell me the inverter was broken. They would repair in a week. The new solar panels installed in May haven't been producing electricity since the end of July. The problem was discovered because I had pushed a wrong button on my Tesla app on my phone, disabling the power flow to my house. I realized I could call Tesla customer service to fix the problem only after calling Provision to report the problem. The receptionist there had issued 'a ticket.' As a result, the serviceman called. He said, "You have a problem." I said, "No, I fixed it." He said, "No, you have a problem." If I hadn't created the first problem, the second wouldn't have been discovered. All's well that ends well.

      Jean, my friend in Arizona, called. We shared family problems and comforted each other.

     Matthew, the head of the special ed department at the local middle school, texted me, saying he would love to learn my method. We made an appointment for Sunday at 2 pm. That way, I will get to listen to my Sunday NPR shows. 

     I texted A's parents to ask if I could meet with him a little earlier because I had another student at 4 pm. I like to give myself ten minutes before the session to set up any needed materials. His mother set up Zoom. I reminded her that she would do a session with us so I could experience A the way she did. She agreed. We worked on telling a story. She had told me he had a great imagination.

     I opened a blank Word document to record the story as he told it. His mom had told me that they always started a story with "Once upon a time. . . . ." I started the story that way and typed away as he spoke. He was stuck and self-conscious. His mom told him to ignore my writing. I removed the document from the screen share. His output flowed when he couldn't see me writing the story. What a difference! Sometimes, I had to ask him to repeat himself, but that didn't seem to slow down the stream of his thoughts.  

     I was impressed with the story he did write. It was about a house that children found scary. Then one child reached out, became familiar with the house, and showed everyone it wasn't dangerous. Again, this theme of someone or something not being normal, people being scared and rejecting it, and reconciliation at the end. This boy knows he's different.

    While the story has good bones, it is going to need work. If Tom Wolfe benefitted from a firm editorial hand, why not a second-grade boy? Over the weekend, I edited it to use it as reading material and a model of a well-structured story.

     I worked on the sight word list for the first time in a long time. Second grade A delayed before saying each word. I randomly pointed to word to ensure he hadn't just memorized the list. He said it was too hard for him to locate the word. His response time was much better when he went right down the list. He confused every, very and over. I had him identify the similarities and differences. He said every and very had ery in common. He missed the v. He easily made it through the first three lists. He got stuck in the middle of the fourth list. I will go back and work on that list.

   At four pm, I started with the oldest of the two girls I had signed on this morning. I had asked the mother if their perceptual problems were visual or auditory. She said both. She said they confused g/q, and b/d. She also said the 11-year-old, W, in fifth grade, was reading at a fourth-grade level. When I started with her, I asked if she had trouble confusing letters. She said no. I suspected she was right. I wondered if the other tutor told the mother that they had this problem because all children with dyslexia automatically do. I don't find that to be the case. I had her read at a low fourth-grade level. She read a paragraph smoothly and accurately except for two two-syllable words. I worked with her on Phase II decoding of multi-syllable words. She responded well. She asked if she could do something fun, math. I explained that we were working on reading, but I would show her something fun. I showed her how to analyze the structure of the words using Phase I. She did find it fun. She should be an easy fix.

    Next, I had the younger sister, M. She could not read Sassy the Cat, a very basic story with words from the-at family. She was decoding all the words, including the. I worked with her on her automatic processing.  

    People who object to phonics programs do so because it forces students always to use their conscious minds to read. One can never become a good reader if one doesn't allow the mind to switch to automatic processing. Like the AA saying, the objective is: "To change what you and change, accept what you can't, and have the wisdom to know the difference." Likewise, a good reader uses automatic processing when appropriate, switches to conscious processing when needed, and has the wisdom to know which one to use. It's not one or the other.  

      Neurological research says that we can recognize words by sight alone, much like Chinese readers recognize ideograms. However, it is also true that our minds process the letters and sounds automatically, bypassing the conscious mind and just delivering the word. It's the 'magic' of reading. As a fourth-grader once said, when she experienced automatic processing for the first time, "I feel like I'm psychic." That's pretty much the way it works. We use the conscious mind to train our unconscious mind or the 'preconscious mind.'

      While I was on Zoom with one of the girls, Mei, my next-door neighbor, arrived at my front door bearing homemade pork dumplings with a sauce made by her fourteen-year-old son. Yum! OMG! So delicious.