Wednesday, April 5, 2023

 Wednesday, April 5, 2023  

  Elsa has taken to sleeping at my feet on the outer edge of the bed. It’s lovely having her close to me. She goes to her spot on Mike’s side of the bed when I get up to go to the bathroom.

    I had nothing early scheduled. Because I could stay in bed a little later, I did, but not by much. I got my in-bed exercises started around five-forty-five. I was up at six thirty. I started the day by applying tea tree oil to Elsa’s lesions. This stuff works better than anything the vets gave me, antibiotics, Apoquel, or the steroid cream. Tea tree oil has a less negative impact. It’s a win-win.

  I expected Melissa to visit at ten. A guest provides motivation to clean. Within an hour, I had vacuumed most of the house and dusted a few tables. It still left the poop stains to be cleaned up. That’s a project.

 Melissa walked down from her house about a mile away. She brought gifts from her garden, two plumeria flowers, and St. John’s Wort sprigs. She asked for a cup for the plumeria. My drinking cups are more like mugs. They were too deep. Did I have a small wine glass? I opened the wine cabinet, revealing my wine glass stash. The door hadn’t been opened since before Mike died. The glasses were covered with dust. She told me the St. John’s Wort was an adaptogen. It does something to regulate mood and reestablish homeostasis. What a great present! Melissa is a doctor who is open to non-AMA solutions.

   We talked about medical issues. Melissa praised Listening to Prozac as a pre-primer to psychiatric studies. I retold the story of the five weeks I spent with Mike in Honolulu before he died of pancreatitis, his last week, and how I finally realized he would die. I love the truth- except when I don’t. I can’t believe how long it took me to grasp that he wouldn’t make it. Then I had to be the one who said pull the plug. What a terrible responsibility. Fortunately, Mike helped me. He made it clear he wanted to go. At the time, I just did what I had to do. Retelling the story, I experienced the stress and sadness I couldn’t feel while going through it.

  I had an acupuncture appointment. She worked on my left arm and shoulder. My arm hurt when I stretched it out above my head. It had been hurting when I slept on my left side. My chiropractor muscle tested me and relieved me of my concern that I had retorn my rotator cuff. Today, the chiropractor found a lump in the middle of my upper arm muscle. It’s soft and has some mobility. It’s unlikely to be cancer, but it can be the cause of the pain I’m feeling. I messaged my primary doctor immediately. It should be checked.

  I had an appointment with Adolescent D at 2 p.m. After I sent him the Zoom invitation, he called and asked if we could meet later. I wish he’d told me sooner, but it required only a small adjustment. Mama K had already contacted me to tell me her three kids were home. I called her, and we went ahead with that session.

       I started with Twin E, who is still reading at a Kindergarten level. She has been doing somewhat better. Her memory of words has improved slightly, but the problem is not resolved. I guide her through the decoding procedure when she encounters a word she doesn’t recognize. What are the vowel letters? In most words in this early text, the vowel is followed by a consonant. I would give her a word she might recognize, ask her what the vowel-consonant combination sounded like, and then have her blend it with the surrounding letters of the word she missed. She is making progress with this.

  Twin A reread a passage on the second-grade level. Today, I asked her comprehension questions. She could tell me what the passage was about and answer explicit and implicit questions. Wow! I hope to have her at a third-grade level by the end of this school year. I can dream anyway.

  Fourth-grade K had to be called several times before he came to the session. He was doing something more interesting. I worked on one passage at the fourth-grade level. He is doing much better for me. I asked him if he thought he was doing better at school. He said yes, definitely. Did his teacher say anything about his performance? No.

  I had my session with Adolescent D. 

I asked him what he wanted to work on. He couldn’t remember what kind of work we had done in the past. Upsetting. In our last session, he read third-grade material. He read with reasonable, although not perfect, accuracy. The flow of his words sounded jerky. I teach students how to modulate their voices so they can read slowly and sound good. Good readers know how to do it. It’s just poor readers who don’t know the tricks.

    I started listening to the Teaching Reading and Learning (TRL)Podcast. It was both inspiring and depressing. The good news is that the speaker, David Kilpatrick, talked about research on orthographic mapping developed and tested by someone in England. Orthographic mapping emphasizes the importance of drilling phonics, so it becomes automatic. In other words, we apply it without conscious thought. It argues that automaticity in reading comes as the reader becomes more familiar with phonics. Research shows this is true at any level of reading. The more the reader knows about phonics, the better they are. I can confirm that from personal experience. After I recorded five stories phoneme by phoneme, I experienced an improvement in my reading speed. 

       The Science of Reading podcasts are all advertisements for traditional phonics methods. The speakers I have heard talk about how schools should teach phonics and what they have done to advocate. It’s a rah-rah podcast. In the TRL podcast, I learned about research. Kilpatrick talked about orthographic mapping. 

   While I was encouraged to find my observations confirmed ‘scientifically.’ I also felt a little down for two reasons. First, if I were on a stage, I would be upstaged by these high-profile people attached to universities. The second observation was equally depressing: they didn’t know all I knew. Teaching phonics alone won’t do it for everyone. One of the objections to phonics instruction is that it has the opposite effect; it blocks automaticity. It can do both.

  It might slip into place for those who use automatic, unconscious processing for any academic activity. I have two exceptions. I worked with a fifth-grade boy. As he read to me, I could feel him consciously process each letter and its related sound. He wanted to be a good student and did what the teacher taught him. I had to show him how to switch to automatic processing. He had drilled enough. Now, he had to trust the unconscious system.’

 The second case was a fourth-grade girl with fetal alcohol syndrome. She was way behind in reading. She finally learned enough phonics to do some decoding independently, but she never used automatic retrieval. I had to show her how to use it. When she did, she said, “I feel like I’m physic.” Yep, that is what it must feel like to someone who never experienced it before. As we read, words just come to mind as if someone whispered them in our ears.