Wednesday, August 10, 2022

 Wednesday, August 10, 2022

 

  On my walk this morning, I asked Vince about the rumor I heard that there are no fish in Hawaiian waters anymore. Vince is eighty-one now. He still goes out fishing every Thursday and earns money making fish jerky. He confirmed the rumor. Due to climate change, the currents passing the islands have changed. They are cooler. The fish like warmer waters. This is a disaster. If the islands are cut off from the mainland and supplies, we will not have a food source. The news hit me hard. I don't know why this piece of news was so much more difficult to take than all the other bad news about our world, the physical disaster caused by climate change, and the social disaster caused by our politics. Dystopia, here we come.

  I drove to Hualoaha to pick up the bread I ordered from SunDog Bakery; a young hippie couple set up this bakery. They started just selling it on the street once a week. The restaurants and hotels discovered it and became their biggest customers. They only sell food to the general public once a week. You can order online between Friday afternoon and Tuesday morning. I did order, but they had no record of it. Fortunately, they still had the types of bread I wanted. 

  As I drove home, I called Judy to find out if anyone would be home for the next half hour. I bought a loaf of sliced sourdough white bread for them. I prefer the unsliced deli sourdough- a rye sourdough.

  My family lived on Jewish sourdough rye bread when I was a kid. We bought half a loaf of unsliced seedless 'cornbread' from Hanscom's once a week. Judy remembered her family buying the same kind of bread, but she had never heard it called cornbread. We talked about how dense the bread of our youth was and the crust was thicker too. Oh, my God, that bread was delicious.

   I met with adolescent D. We continued working on the six-syllable patterns. He still had trouble remembering that V stood for vowel. He used a metacognitive trick to retrieve the memory. Instead of saying "Vowel" in response to the V, he named the vowel letters. That helped him retrieve the name. It was the first time I observed him using a metacognitive strategy I hadn't introduced. He didn't do it consciously; he fell into it.

   Two seconds later, when we looked at the second pattern, VC, he couldn't remember the word vowel when I asked him what the V stood for. Does he get stuck because he gets scared he won't be able to remember, or is there a neurological problem? He was better at illustrating the syllable patterns. When given VC, he quickly gave a vowel and a consonant. Well, more quickly. He still had problems identifying the vowel sound for each pattern, but he knew it had to be either long or short. 

   I told him to remember examples he could read of the VC pattern, as in, on, or an. "Is the vowel long or short? Listen. Does it make its own name? If not, it's short. Use the knowledge you have to figure out something unfamiliar." To do that means having pattern recognition. He doesn't seem to have that. He may not have functional pattern recognition in the 3-D world or the social world. We did a whole sentence identifying the pattern in each syllable. He did reasonably well. But he still borrowed letters from other syllables. So, in the word ve/hic/le, he said the second syllable had the VCe pattern, borrowing the e from the last syllable. He said his reading is improving. No, he is making no conscious effort to look for patterns. Yes, he's listening to the audio file. No, his mother is not involved. No, his mother has not tried to get him to read the transcript I sent. All I can do is ask repeatedly. Wheedling, whining, and bullying don't work.