Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Tuesday, November 30, 2021

 

   Last night was another good night's sleep. Tuesdays, I have to get up when the alarm goes off because I have driveway yoga at 7 am.  The two women who joined us before Thanksgiving joined us today, plus two on the phone from Seattle. Yvette said we might have an extra dog today if her friend Becca joined us.  She didn't make it. 

  I found a full garbage bag sitting in my utility sink. Huh?  I texted Yvette. Ah, this was the cat food for Judy. Yvette's aging, senile cat couldn't eat dry food anymore. The bag was for Judy and Paulette for their cats.  

    I don't have enough to do. I also don't have a book I can get lost in.  I have other things to do. I have some clerical work, small revisions on the will, finding some way to get Mike's gravestone engraved, fixing two windchimes, no three, and general ongoing housekeeping.

    Good God, my eyes are shot.  I don't know how much of the problem was created by old glasses versus my eyes.  The print looks clearer without my glasses.  My double vision problem may have gotten worse.  One day as I drove, I had to deal with two overlapping images of the road and cars.  I managed not to have an accident. Well, I wasn't doing just 5 mph; I was safe. 

    I finally Googled stone engravers Hawaii.  There was a long list. I found two that actually did gravestone engraving.  Only one of those had a receptionist that knew what she was talking about. One had a receptionist that didn't know and spoke with a local accent.  I don't know which was worse, how much trouble I had understanding her, her lack of information,  or her i-don't-know attitude. While I'm against forcing students to learn to speak 'properly' before they can learn to read, I am not opposed to people learning the standard dialect. Neither am I opposed to someone maintaining the local one. If people can be bi-lingual, they can also be bi-dialectal. 

     On that note, I had a talk with Mama K today.  She told me that her girls don't speak correct English. It winds up they speak Hawaiian Pigeon at home, and they do that just fine. This means they don't have an auditory processing problem. They are learning the vocabulary and grammar of Hawaiian Pigeon, the local creole. It's a mixture of something like six different languages. Does that make it a less than language?  What do you think English is?   All languages start out as mixtures. There's a linguist's joke: What's the difference between a dialect and a language? Ans: A standing army.  Yes, it's power that makes something a language versus a substandard something or another.   

   Damon put out the Zoom invitations for my birthday. August will be the game master. Yvette will be busy working, and Shivani wrote that she won't be available either. It will be Damon, Cylin, August, Jean, John and the Zims. 

    I started distributing the soil amendment around my hibiscus as recommended by Margo. The bag of G & B soil conditioner weighs 85 lbs. I'm shoveling out a scoop at a time. I can do that, but I'm not sure it will make any difference. I suspect the gardeners randomly stuck it in the hard soil without first preparing it.  What do I know?  Not much when it comes to gardening. I'm a disaster when it comes to gardening. Whatever I plant or ask someone else to plant doesn't grow well.  When living in Princeton, I planted two forsythias. One died, and one didn't grow over a foot. They're weeds, for God's sake. I can't even get weeds to grow. 

       I had a session with 3rd grade A. He wasn't signed in on time. I called mom; no answer and her voicemail was full. I called dad; he answered but was at work. He contacted mom, and she got A on.  They say they're busy. I'm sure they are. They were busy before Covid. This all started about two months ago. At times, mom was downright snarky, rude.  I can appreciate she was busy, but she has also refused to cooperate with me.  A has difficulty doing some of the practices I ask of him because he wants to be 'normal.' I would say he is not normal; I would say his parents are in greater denial than he is.  It is a frustrating situation. Too many unpleasant variables.  If they drop the rudeness factor, expressing outrage that I should expect them to cancel before  I contact them to ask them where they are, I would feel a little better. 

   Today, A looked better than I have ever seen him before. He looked almost normal.  I have been doing the same thing over and over. "Can you read the next word or would you like help?" If he couldn't read it and asked for help, I had him name the vowels, which I wrote on the screen. He then identifies the following consonants, blends the individual sounds, and blends the syllables. Having completed Phase ll on the word, we then did Phase l, dividing words into syllables according to how we actually say the word and then identifying the individual sounds in every syllable.  He asked if he couldn't work on spelling. I have learned to always figure out how to incorporate students' requests into the lesson.  I completed the sentence we were working on and then dictated that sentence to him.  He did reasonably well, except that he reversed letters.  When spelling the or in for, he said ro. He did that with some of the other letter combinations.  Very interesting!  I have consistently found that if a student requests anything to do with reading, they are addressing their needs intuitively.  This will be an amazing process for him. I am going to use it with adolescent D too.

   I watched the first two episodes of Season 6 of Grantchester on Masterpiece Theater.  The lead actor is different; there's a new vicar in town, but he's just a chummy with the same local detective inspector as the previous vicar was.  It was pretty good. When I checked, I discovered that the new vicar started in season 5. I'll have to go back and watch it.