Saturday, September 3, 2022

Saturday, September 3, 2022

    Today, it was officially three and a half years since Mike died. I was doing well. I don't know if I would be doing much better if he were alive. I had an underlying sadness that was always with me. Mike said it was as if I had been tortured. That's what my childhood felt like. However, I do know when he was alive, I smiled more. There was always a giggle in my heart and mind. That's gone for now. I can feel the difference in my face when I think of him. He filled me with laughter, the laughter one feels about puppies or small children. No, I didn't see or treat him like a small child. He delighted me. I laughed with delight.

   A tutor who still needed to meet with her student signed on for my Reading & Writing office hours. I told her I would send her name to Julia, and she was done.

  A second tutor who joined my Zoom office hours had met with her student and reported problems with comprehension, spelling, and reference tracing. I shared the document on what I call WbyW. It stands for Word by Word because it asks four categories of questions about each sentence. It fosters comprehension on the sentence level. Most methods for teaching comprehension assume comprehension at that level is obvious. It's not.

    I also shared my article on teaching spelling. I showed her how to trace references through a paragraph using a different color for each noun and its subsequent references.

      Elsa and I went up to Paulette's for water. We both enjoy our visits. Paulette and I talk about nothing in particular and everything while she throws her cat's stuffed mouse around for Elsa.

  On TED Radio Hour, they talked about Wiki and its relative neutrality of tone. It's all run by volunteers who write about their interests. The editors monitor the contributors and each other. Nothing is entirely neutral. But their writing is cool, not hot. I found an exception to that neutrality a few years ago when I looked up Cranial Sacral therapy. The article was overtly hostile. I just reread it. It was toned down. Instead of stating the whole process is quackery, it cites people who claim it is. A little better.