Wednesday, January 18, 2023

Wednesday, January 18, 2023 

 

    I only had two sessions today, one with adolescent D and another with the three children in Mama K's crew.  

   I started with the letter tracing exercise with D. I've given this activity different names. Tracing may be the best. I slowly form/write letters with a broad font on the Zoom Share Screen; D follows my movement, 'writing' the letters on a flat surface with his finger. The objective is to enhance letter perception.

    We only did the tracing activity briefly at the beginning of the session. Then we continued reading Investing for Young Adults, the first book D ever received as a gift. Today was a good day. He remembered more words. That skill comes and goes. We're looking for some way to access it on a steady basis.

   I had Mama K's crew next. Twin A can switch back and forth between implicit memory and explicit. Many words just come to her; those that don't, she decodes. She doesn't get stuck in one modality versus another. I started her with third-grade material. She needs a lot of support but can figure out at least 75% of a passage.  

   On the other hand, Twin E is still struggling with automatic recall and switches to decoding. She has made strides with automatic recall, but I can understand her resistance. The automatic processing is weak, so she avoids relying on it. She won't try it first as she must if she is going to improve. You can't read on conscious decoding alone. It's too labor intensive. It involves a lot of attention and energy. You lose the meaning of the words. Today, she struggled. It was painful for me as well as for her. Besides that, the erase function wasn't working on the Zoom Share Screen function and couldn't erase the underlying I had done with Twin A. I was happy to quit. So was she.

  I finally had a session with fourth-grade K. He said he was still working on the spider story. His topic was the wolf spider. He had almost nothing to say. I had to pull it out of him. I went to a website on the wolf spider on my other computer. I asked him questions based on what I was reading. He could answer all of them correctly. He had the information he needed. He wants the text to come to him fully formed. Neuroscientists now believe we all think in images and translate those images into words. When I pushed him to 'see' the wolf spider in his imagination, he produced something interesting. He had the spider hiding from a predator. He didn't know what that predator might be. It was still interesting.

  Yesterday, I moved the chest of drawers blocking access to the doggie door Mike, and I had put in when we were planning to bring our two Portuguese Water dogs with us. We were without a dog for several years after arriving in Hawaii. Then we got Elsa, our thirteen pounds of fluff. Having her push through that door seemed too much. Having her use my lanai carpet as her deposit area became too much. Especially since it happens when her bowels are loose. Today, I squeezed behind the bureau with Elsa in my arms, opened the door, and pushed her through.

    She was very resistant. At first, I thought it was the discomfort of pushing on the large plastic flap. When I got the flap high enough, I saw I had forgotten to move the chaise lounge away from the door. I was pushing her into the padding on the chair. She escaped once I had it open enough to reveal the cushion's top. That was a bad start.

    Stephen Dubner discussed Adam Smith on Freakonomics. Adam Smith was an eighteenth-century philosopher considered the father of economics and capitalism. People of all persuasions quote him in support of their point of view. Milton Friedman cited him as an advocate of capitalism.  

    Apparently, Adams was a prolific writer. To have read all his work, one must be a devoted scholar. While he is quoted as a capitalist, saying man is invested in his own advancement, he also contradicts that point of view. He says man needs to feel loved by his fellow man. That leads to the inhibition of total self-interest or expands it to include the interests of others. I prefer the latter statement. I can use Adams to argue my point of view, too.