Monday, September 12, 2022
I started listening to my audio file on YouTube, The 5 Stories. I found it irritating tonight. One of my parents refused to play the audio file for her son because she couldn't stand it. I associate irritation at that order with an auditory process problem. Now, I sympathized with her. I listened to it while I slept, hoping it would have the same beneficial effect on me as on my kids. My word-recalling skill is not what it used to be. All people of my age complain of this loss. I put the volume on low. I could hear it, but it didn't disturb my sleep. I listened while awake and wondered how this audio file could work. I couldn't hear all the individual sounds, the purpose of listening to the audio file in the first place.
At 9 a.m., I had my initial interview with Linknow Media, the website company Shelly uses.
Damon pushed me, saying no one would take me seriously if I didn't have one. I had no idea what I was going to do or say. These folks could help me set it up. I was conflicted. It left me frightened about what I was getting into. I pushed through. I made a deposit. It would cost several thousand to design the website and another thousand yearly to maintain it. I wasn't looking to make money, not enough to cover the annual fee. I finally decided this was ridiculous. If my YouTube videos don't attract a lot of attention, how will a website help? I chose not to do it. I had to call the good folks to see if I could get my money back.
I had only one tutor for my Monday morning office hour. She had met with her student already. There were two problems she identified: decoding multi-syllable words and summarizing. I showed her the six-step procedure I use for decoding words of more than one syllable and directed her to watch my Phase II video if she wanted to see it again.
It took a minute to identify this student's problem with summarizing. She said she could do it when they talked about it. She reverted to a complete retelling when she wrote about it. I suggested she dictate it to the tutor while she typed it. That could free her from her compulsion to retell rather than summarize.
I had Adolescent D at 2 p.m. I reviewed the mathematical relationship of 3 to a in the expression 3a. His mother said she had told him repeatedly it was multiplication, and he consistently forgot it. His memory was a problem. He remembered it today. I still wanted to review my prepared lesson because it was clever. I speculated that he had trouble with 3a because he confused it with the relationship between 3 and 4, as in 34. He understood the relationship between 3 & 4 was not multiplication, but he didn't know what the relationship was. Yes, he knew what expanded notation was. I asked him what the 3 in 34 stood for. He didn't know. I displayed the relationship in an addition format. 30 +4-=
I reviewed 6M + 3 = 2 m + 15. He could give me a lot of it, but not all. I asked him how he thought he did. He said he did some of it, but not all. It was the first time he gave me a realistic view of his performance. I was relieved. In the past, he would claim to know something when he didn't. I started to worry that he wasn't in touch with reality.
His mother told me his physical space was always neat and organized. I asked him why he was neat and organized in space but not on paper; while his room was neat, he didn't organize his writing on paper. I asked him why. He didn't know. He speculated that it was because he was used to working in the 3D world and not on paper. It was good thinking. He probably had trouble with all the 2D work. That is Orton's theory; the learning disabled are 3D thinkers, not 2D. Several neuroscientists believe a left-brain deficit causes learning disabilities. Students have difficulty with all 2D representations.
I had the M & W sisters later in the afternoon. Second-grade M wanted to work on the question' game. I love that she considers this rigorous intellectual work a game. It is way above her grade level. Today, we spent a lot of time working on the word 'except.' It took a long time to get the concept through. She finally generated the following sentence: "I like the dress except for the zipper." We got into set theory and Venn diagrams. She was at the beginning of second grade and reading third-grade material fluently. She was doing just fine.
I reread my updates for the year before daily. In the last two days, I came across my early work with M & W. M was struggling with reading material at a kindergarten level. She has indeed come a very long way.
Sixth grade W showed me some work she did for her art class. She had to make a map showing her activities for the day. Wow! It was gorgeous. I knew the girl was into art, but I had no idea she was this good. I told her her art teacher must feel like she's in heaven with a student like her. She nodded in agreement. W doesn't need any help now. Her mother told me the educational evaluation on her showed she had a pronounced deficit. I've been trying to get a copy of this report for six months to find out where it is.
I knew the McCracken method of teaching reading had something in common with my approach. I finally checked it. It is similar to my Phase I; it has the students sound out every phoneme in a word when spelling it. It resembles my Phase I in that regard. It differs from my Phase I because it only works with words selected because they conform to a phonics principle; they are all phonetically regular. That will help students to learn to read like 'good readers,' figuring out words independently. My method uses natural language, emphasizing decoding what you can combine with using context clues to figure out the word.
I continued watching the Extraordinary Attorney Woo. The main character is supposed to be autistic. I have never seen an adult autistic person look the way she does. She is physically awkward, but not in the way I've seen. Things confuse her, but it makes her look cute, adorable. That's not usually our reaction when we see an adult in perpetual confusion.
I find myself feeling her movement in my body. I have no idea why my mirror neurons are firing as they are.
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