Monday, September 19, 2022

 Monday, September 19, 2022

 

  I got 4,000 steps in on my morning walk. Part of the way, I walked with Tom and his dog Kai. He complained about one of our neighbors who walks two dogs and doesn't pick up after them. Luke is a good-sized dog and leaves good-sized dumps; Max is much smaller. Usually, the dogs do their business on the verge. Elsa likes to do it in the middle of the road. She's thirteen pounds; her dumps are not huge. I always pick up after her. Tom asked me if I knew who the woman was. I told him her name. He told me to talk to her about her behavior, give her a piece of my mind. The only thing I would accomplish is alienating her. You can't convince someone to do what you want by laying into them. You have to determine if someone is open before you start a lecture. Zero positive. I ran into Tom again at the other end of my walk. I had thought about it. I warned him that she would say, "My hands are full of the dogs' leashes. How do you expect me to pick up poop?" I have heard her say that the poop dropped in the neighborhood is washed away with the rain. We have plenty of wild animals in our neighborhood who poop wherever they wish, chickens, turkeys, pheasants, cats, dogs, and, of course, two-hundred-pound wild pigs. When I walk with this woman, she complains about one source of aggravation or another. I assume I will hear about her encounter with Tom. If I can find an opening, I will say something. 

   At two, I had an appointment with adolescent D. He read some material from school appropriate for his grade level, 9th grade. He did very well, reading accurately and fluently. Then he hit the word shared. He read it as structured. Wow! That's a leap. It didn't fit the letters or the meaning. He stopped sharing, and I opened up my Zoom whiteboard. I wrote the word shared. "How many vowel letters?" He got those right. "Does the e make a sound in this word?" Yes. How often have I reviewed the rule that the e in the final -ed is silent unless a t or a d precedes it? If he could remember PEMDAS, the order operations, why couldn't he remember this rule about the pronunciation of the final -ed? Is he lazy? Arrogant? What is going on? Why doesn't he do self-drill like everyone else? I view this as an honest question, not a rhetorical one. I had him repeat the rule two or three times.

  The next step was to figure out the sound of ar in shared. He had no idea. He tried -er. Er, ir, and ur make that sound consistently, and ar and or make the /er/ sound at the end of a word. I wrote are a familiar word, one he would never misread in a sentence, one he would immediately recognize. He tried to decode it. Holy cow! I realized either he recognizes a word automatically or nothing happens. There was no coordination between his working memory and his unconscious processing. It was either one or the other. He couldn't toggle back and forth. His automatic processing could be quite good – until it hit a bump in the road. Then nothing. No wonder he argued with me about my methods. He could not apply conscious thought because he had no access to what was in long-term memory. All the rules, all the patterns he learned, were unavailable.