Tuesday, August 24, 2021

 Tuesday, August 24, 2021

 

      When I woke, my dizziness and nausea were gone. However, I still felt weirdly light, as if the very cells in my chest, shoulders, and arms are shifting around rather than staying in place. I'm not sure if this is good or bad. It is scary, a bit uncomfortable.

       Boy, the time slips by so quickly. Of course, I'm not going anywhere- except I want to finish my videos on my reading method. What's completed is posted on YouTube. I assumed it would get some hits, but no. The only hits come from me or Tommy, my tech, as we make modifications. 

    I was plagued by sadness last night. I miss Mike because he consistently affirmed me. He liked me and enjoyed my company. Sadly, that can't be said about most of my family. But they don't seem to like each other either.  

   I had an email from one of the Step Up Tutoring Tutors asking for help. Perfect. I have plenty of time on my hands for now. They were supposed to assign me two groups of six incoming tutors to mentor. I also will get one student through the public school. In addition, several of my private students took the summer off. Let's see if their parents contact me. If not, I will advertise for additional students. Now I know I can have current clients post information about me on the Kona Moms site. I'll go with that instead of Craig's list.

     I got work done on the new slide. I revised the script several times. We'll see. Doing the work clarifies my thinking; I keep on learning. It's like there's always a new twist. I want to get to the point where I share two-minute videos on something new I learned that day. I see videos like that for makeup or music sites.

     I met with the tutor who contacted me asking for help on Zoom. She wasn't clear about her student's problem. From her description of her student, it sounded like she was a) reliant on memory rather than decoding skills, and b) confused about what was involved in the learning phase. Many students conclude that they are supposed to be able to glance at the word and 'know' what it is. After all, this is what they observe good readers do. In doing so, they skip the learning process and don't learn how to read.

     The tutor had an accent. She came to the US from Italy when she was twenty-four. I showed her Phase I with sight words with 2nd-grade text from Barnell Loft, sentences I had already partially decoded. I led her through the work. She realized two things: the process was fun and harder than she thought it would be.

     The tutor said that she would never be able to get rid of her Italian accent. I told her I knew of a method. As we worked, she could hear how she pronounced certain sounds differently from a native speaker of American English. We worked with the word California. She said she was teased for how she pronounced it. Note: she lived in California. I helped her figure out how she pronounced it differently from those around her so she could choose to change.

     I was supposed to have a session with A and his mom, so she could bring out aspects of his personality I hadn't seen. She describes him as funny. I'm concerned she means he does things because of his lack of awareness of appropriate behavior, and they laugh at him. We laugh in delight at a three-year-old's behavior. That same behavior in an older child with the same lack of awareness is considered completely inappropriate. We'll see. I'm still concerned A has some serious problems.  

    In today's session, we continued analyzing the phonemic structure of every word on the sight word list. I observed him listening and hearing those sounds. I had him work with the grade two material. This is still a jump for him. At the end of second grade, he finally tested as a beginning first-grade level. His parents were thrilled.

  .  I lay down for a nap after that last session. Elsa started barking like mad, and then I heard a female voice in my driveway. I thought it might be Judy, but it was Mei, my next-door neighbor. She brought over a bowl of homemade Chinese dumplings. OMG! Were they ever good!

    Later in the afternoon, Matthew, head of the special education department at the local public intermediate school, came by to drop off an application form. He had asked me to work for the school tutoring adolescent D. That meant the school would pick up the tab for the hours I worked with him.

    Matthew is thrilled to have me onboard. He said they needed nine special ed teachers for the school. They had seven, and then two quit. He also knew I had more training and experience than any of the teachers on his staff. He says he was interested in learning what I do since I was successful.

    My Bose radio was just fine today. I realized I had only switched between two NPR stations; I hadn't tried a station that would have been operating on a completely different system. There must have been something wrong with their transformers. This often happens; a good wind or earthquake gets something out of whack.

  When I stood up after sitting for a long time, I noticed that my hip got into gear more quickly than it had in the past. Something about the changes I'm making in my movements and alignment is making things better.