Saturday, April 16, 2022

 Saturday, April 16, 2022

   Another good night's sleep! It was grey all morning, overcast. We would be on the grid by 6pm today. There wasn't enough sun to charge the solar batteries to last the night.

    I texted the mom of the M & W sisters to check on the weekend's schedule. She canceled. This made me sad on two counts, both for my own sake. First, they knew they would be seeing this other tutor, and I wasn't told beforehand. Second, I felt the loss of my time with them, my time with anyone. As for the girls, I hoped this would help them. 

     Their dad was overly worried about the girls. His anxiety created anxiety for them. The girls weren't doing above-grade-level work, but both were on grade level. In an earlier conversation, the dad said he saw a big difference in his girls since I started with them. His seeking out additional help was a reflection of his anxiety. Not good. I can only hope this woman will be good for them. 

  Unfortunately, I have reason to doubt it. When I asked their mom for the report on the extensive educational testing, she told me that woman said she wasn't allowed to share it with anyone. Huh? They paid a small fortune for the testing. She said they couldn't share it with people working with their kids. The story I got was someone once shared the woman's report with the child's school, and there was a blow-up. Why was there a blow-up? I fear this woman will be too tightly wound to work well with these girls. If she reflects her dad's anxiety, it won't be good. There was no reason to decide now, and it wouldn't be for me to make that decision under any circumstances. It all still made me sad. The gray day didn't help.  

  I started the deep cleaning in preparation for Sir Damon's visit. I have a wheelchair-accessible shower pan. Mike and I designed the bathroom with our old age in mind. The pan is covered with river stones. It's lovely. Between mineral deposits and soap residue, its finish is dulled. I spray it with Pam cooking oil, which I wash off with Dawn dish detergent and a scrubbing pad. The stones regained their luster.  

        I also ironed another in the linen set from when my house guest was here and bathed Elsa. She was breaking out with new lesions. The salve the doctor gave me does help. When I find a new spot and apply it promptly, the lesion is better the next day. However, the doctor's advice was to bathe her minimally once a week. If her skin was bad, I was supposed to bathe her every other day. I hate doing that because she hates to be bathed. She shakes the whole time. But by this time, she knows the routine. She stiffens her body as I carry her to the kitchen sink, but she's completely cooperative. When I'm finished, I reach for the towel. She knows that drill too. I carry her to the door from my bathroom shower and drop her into the yard. She pees immediately.

    I found more dusty leaves on my crepe myrtle. I made another batch of the spray with the horticultural oil. The proportions are one tablespoon to a gallon of water. I filled a spray bottle with approximately a quart. I used the quarter-teaspoon measure in the past. That didn't do anything. I kept finding more infected leaves. I decided to use the half-teaspoon measure. Oil sticks to the spoon as it is and doesn't make it into the mix. 

    I met on Zoom with Jana at 5 pm my time. She is a Step Up Tutor who wants to learn more about teaching to become a tutor for-profit herself. She was very taken with my methods. We started with Phase I. She was impressed with the results and asked me to mentor her. Delightful.  

    I had a Zoon session with Jana. She shared something distressing. In her suburban development, people have stopped making eye contact and saying hello. That's the scariest piece of news I've heard. I assumed things were tougher on the mainland than here, but this is worse than I expected. 

   With Jana's permission, I recorded our session today. I was hoping to use it as-is for a YouTube post. Naturally, I didn't like the way I looked or sounded. Besides other problems, I wasn't looking into the camera. Jana's image was over to the side. I was looking at that. I covered a world of topics.

1.         Reading comprehension: Students may have problems because they want to answer with their background knowledge rather than what the article says. They ignore what the author says in favor of their background knowledge or personal logic. Third-grade K read a passage on night blindness. The author described the problem and then said eating certain foods brought some improvement. K had to choose between a) night blindness is never good

b) can be improved. K chose a. That is true. It can never be corrected to the point where someone would describe it as good. But the author included additional information, which made the second answer also true. The student has to infer the 'correct' answer.

This is a skill we need in every conversation.

   In a second case, third-grade M completely ignored the words in the text and my instructions. 

  The sentence was, "An enormous animal that looks like a dinosaur is believed to be alive in Africa today." BLDCC Unit 1#1 (1982). The question was," What is believed to be alive in Africa today?" The directions were to only use the words in the sentence for her answer. Her answer was Komodo Dragon. She ignored the information provided. 

2.         Auditory processing and speech.

Third-grade K is my go-to guy for this story. He listened to The Phonics Discovery System 5 Stories to help him with his speech and auditory processing. His speech was unintelligible to his fourteen-year-old brother and eleven-year-old sister when he was six or seven. I observed him say something to them; they looked at each other in confusion, hoping the other had understood.

I had the older brother, who shared a room with the younger one,  play the audio file every night. (Sorry, I'm not a researcher and don't make notes on when this started.) After a week, I asked the older brother if he saw a difference. He said no. How about K's comprehension when people speak to him? Oh, yes. By the beginning of third grade, K spoke normally. No one would know his speech had been unintelligible a year earlier. 

I gave him three lessons in decoding using The Phonics Discovery System Phase I; that's all. His word recognition skills were on grade level in third grade. Speech problems usually predict word recognition problems.

I noticed a difference in K's older brother's eyes. I asked him if listening to the audio file every night had impacted him. He said no. E was the top student in his freshman high school class. You can see why he didn't think so. I asked him if he found he understood people better when they spoke. He said yes. 

I experienced an improvement in my ability to listen to others after recording the audio file for the first time when I was 58. This happens because our perceptions of speech sounds are sharpened. This increases our sensory input, providing more stimulation and making attending easier. Listening to the audio file could impact some cases of attention deficit disorder.

3.         Jana talked about six-year-old children in her after-school program who are destructive to the point of violence. If they can't do what they want to do when they want to, they will attack other students and the teachers. The teachers there are dealing with this behavior through 'consequences.' I prefer asking the student if this is the person they want to be. Are they comfortable with their behavior? Approaching students this way has been satisfyingly effective. 

On one occasion, I sat with an upset student and silently repeated the Hohoponopono prayer, "I'm sorry, forgive me, thank you, I love you." He went back into the classroom as a changed child. The teacher commented, "You really are a miracle worker." However, some students are too disturbed for this approach to have any positive effect. In that case, my best advice is to run.

4.         I showed Jana a simple trick to help people with ADD. I have used this successfully with a few students. Since I only use it when my intuition prompts it, it needs to be validated. I draw a rambling line s-l-o-w-l-y on a paper or Zoom whiteboard. It's mesmerizing. There was an immediate dramatic change with the first student I did this with. I used it with K too. His mother heard his teacher constantly call his name while online during Covid. Then it stopped. There have been no complaints about his behavior this year. 

5.         I told Jana about the BrainManagementSkills procedure I developed. This is a simple approach to helping students use their brains differently. It involves determining which sections of the brain they use for both short and long-term visual and auditory processing and memory and telling them the right part to use if they get it wrong. Does this resolve all problems? Of course not. Nothing works for all people at all times. Again, I have had success using it; it's cheap, easy, fast, and fun.

I told Jana the story of my work with one of my students, which significantly impacted my work. Bob was in middle school. His mother was a friend of the mother of some other students of mine.  

 I asked Bob to repeat nonsense words to determine his auditory processing skills. He couldn't. I had played a note on a pitch pipe to orient him in the auditory sensory part of his brain. He showed me he was using the correct part. But still, he couldn't repeat the nonsense words. I went to lift the pitch pipe to my lips when Bob said, "You played an F#." What!!!??

I asked him what side of the brain he used to process speech sounds. He pointed to the right side of his head. I said, "Use the left side." He had no problem repeating the nonsense words.

I didn't see him again. But I did run into this mother in town a few years later. She said, "Remember, you fixed Bob in one session." He had been using the wrong auditory processing center for language. He had used the one on the right rather than the left. He did that because he had this super instrument on the right for music. He tried to use it for everything. There was nothing wrong with the boy. He just made a choice without understanding the consequences. Choices like these are made very early in life, long before entering school.