Saturday, August 27, 2022

 Saturday, August 27, 2022

 

  On the upside, I walked faster, my stride was more even, and I had a more significant bend in my left knee since the THR operation. On the downside, my legs continued to be weak, and my left ankle and foot remained a problem. I did not have the strength in my left leg to ensure the balance I needed, nor could I get up off the floor without hauling myself up with my arms. All told, about as good as I was before the surgery but not much better. The area around my surgical site was still numb. My right foot is a whole other matter. This problem never had anything to do with my arthritic hip. 

   I had my Saturday at 7 a.m. Reading & Writing Office hour for Step-Up Tutoring. A young man came on who hadn’t met with his student yet. He was fulfilling his obligation to participate in someone’s office hour, one of the administrator’s, Julia’s, or Laura’s, or one of the instructional sessions, mine, the tech support, or the math support. However, neither Laura nor Julia never told us what we were supposed to do. When I observed someone in Julia’s office hour, she acknowledged their presence. It looked like that was all they had to do: show up. I asked the tutor if he had Julia’s tool kit on what to do at the first session. He had. I told him we were done. Then he asked what he was supposed to do if his student didn’t speak English. He had been communicating with his student in Spanish through Remind. I thought it was unlikely his student didn’t speak English unless he was one of the children who had just crossed the border. He thought he might have communicated with the parents instead of the student. I told him to get back to me if the kid spoke no English.

   A second volunteer student came on a few minutes later. She had met with her student and had a problem. Her student left out the function words when he wrote. My first question was, did he do that in conversation? No. I recommended a few strategies—the co-writing activity. The student dictates a story while the tutor types what they say. If the student can’t dictate a complete story, he can give the tutor ideas, and the tutor composes it. The tutor is modeling verbal expression skills. While the exercise may start with the tutor doing most of the work, in my experience, the student quickly makes contributions on their own. The tutor’s job is to ask questions to develop an idea and elicit details. The second suggestion is to have the student dictate composed sentences to the tutor while the tutor types slowly. The student has to learn to slow down. They have to do this when they write themselves. We have to hold a complete sentence in our heads and then write one word at a time. I don’t know about you, but I often leave out words as I race to get my ideas down. That’s what editing is about. I would be lost without Grammarly, which catches all those missed words. The third suggestion was that the tutor dictate phrases, clauses, or sentences to the student. The student has to learn how to hold the complete sentence in his mind, isolate the ‘next’ word, write that word, and then retrieve the whole sentence correctly. This is a very complex neurological task. It’s like learning to juggle. 

   The tutor also asked about how to teach spelling. I demonstrated my approach. English is an alphabetic language; the letters represent the basic sounds within words, the phonemes. Not all languages work that way. Some use ideograms, as Chinese does. Some alphabetic languages work on a one-to-one ratio: a sound for each letter and a letter for each sound. English is not so kind. It has single letters representing multiple sounds and single sounds represented by multiple letters. Learning to read and spell English takes work.

  To learn to spell a word, start by sounding it out, compare it to the ‘right’ spelling, and figure out how much of the word you must visually memorize. For example, let’s work on the word enormous. Start with figuring out how many syllables are in the word. Spell the word one syllable at a time. The first syllable is the long /e/ sound. There are many different ways to spell that sound. I’m going to choose ee. The second syllable is nor. The n sound doesn’t have many options, as does the or sound. The final syllable presents a challenge. It sounds like /mus/, so let’s spell it that way. As I sounded out the word, I spelled it eenormus. You get the correct spelling if you spell-check the word with this spelling. Not all spellings get you there. Also, anyone can read this word as it is spelled. 

  The next step is comparing your sounded-out spelling to the ‘right one.’ Instead of ee, the word is spelled with a single e. This is a good opportunity for a teacher to ask if anyone has seen a word that starts with ee. There is at least one, eel. But that is a single-syllable word. Enormous is multi-syllable. Can anyone think of a multi-syllable English word that starts with ee? In doing this, we are teaching spelling patterns we can use to spell words. Being familiar with patterns also affects our spelling of /mus/. /Mus/ is a final syllable, usually spelled with an o, as in mous.

  I wish teachers would give partial credit for words correctly sounded out on spelling tests and students’ writing. When a word is considered totally wrong when misspelled, we encourage our students to use small words they think they can spell correctly. We are limiting their vocabulary.

  I went down for a two-hour nap. I had no idea why I was so tired. I slept most of yesterday and then slept well last night, and now I need more sleep today. It feels like grief exhaustion.

  I got two calls, one from Jean M, my friend, and one from Damon. He and August attended a music convention in NYC. I knew they were going. I didn’t know that August presented something he composed with an accompanying video. His music got great reviews. Damon sent me a video of his performance. August’s music is composed on the computer. Not quite to my taste, but I was glad he was well received.

  August was returning to school for his second semester. Damon said he had a wonderful single room, but his building had no air conditioning. Damon bought him a window air conditioner even though he’s not allowed to have one. They’re hoping his infraction won’t be noticed.

   Next weekend, Damon and Cylin traveled to Massachusetts for a fiftieth birthday party for one of Damon’s college friends. About thirty people were gathering at an elegantly remodeled motel. The host, the birthday boy, was paying for the food, drinks, and entertainment. The guests are paying for transportation and the room. 

  Thinking about his old college friends got Damon thinking about relationships from his childhood he’s maintained and about friends from high school that he’s dropped. I’d been thinking the same thing of late. Judy has friends from elementary school. I had one friend. I had her address her for years. I notified her when Mike died. She told me her husband had died several years before. Obviously, we didn’t have much to do with each other. Damon did better than I did. He made friends with Nicole in elementary school and is still in touch with her. I had one good friend in elementary school and one in high school. I am in email contact with both, but we don’t communicate much. We are very different people. Or maybe we are just not willing to put up with those aspects of each other that make us uncomfortable.