Friday, March 8, 2024

Friday, March 8, 2024

 

  When I called Jean today, she shoved me off again. She’s busy with paperwork. She has always been that way. However, now she asks me if I “need to speak with her,” am I in need? I resolved to call once a week from now on. I wonder if she will notice the difference? She sounded annoyed today. Of course, I told her to stop asking me if I had a need to talk. If that’s the only reason she wants to talk to me, I have to limit the contact. There has to be some joy.

   My stats on the videos remained unchanged for a few days, which is rare. The With Mike; Without Mike blog numbers are in the triple digits, as they have been for the last few weeks. Clearly, someone in China and Singapore is teaching English and making my blog required reading. Today, there were 202 hits. Then, on the weekend, there was only 1 hit. When the teacher takes a break, the blog stats will return to one or two hits today.

    I’m having a tough time. I have to make scary big decisions about not very major issues, like cutting down trees. Other people are impacted and uncomfortable with what’s going on. I get conflicting information from people and have to sort it out when I don’t have good background knowledge.

  I had an appointment with Randee for a haircut. She had let her hair grow out longer, including her bangs. She looked great. She reminded me of someone else. I had trouble making the connection, and it drove me crazy. I finally realized it was Michele Dockery. I love her. I commented she looked better now that she had broken up with Dustin. She said many people were saying that. She had also been dating someone new for the last three months, and it was going well. All good, upbeat news. It lifted my spirits, which were somewhat down in the dumps.

    I headed off to Jack Be Click, our local Apple expert. No, we do not have an Apple Store on the Big Island. They’re all on Oahu. It took him five minutes to solve the problems on all three of my computers. I had issues signing in to Microsoft on the two Apple devices, and the Surface Pro Tablet didn’t seem to work at all. He said the keyboard on the Surface Pro had died. They’re cheap and break easily. He didn’t charge me for his time. That was an upbeat moment, not because it saved me money and aggravation but because it was a caring gesture.

   I made a quick stop at Target for Dave’s multi-grain bread and some O.J. I went to Ulu Wini next. The side door, which is usually open to receive people from the community, was closed. That was weird. Maybe they didn’t work on Friday morning or any morning. I went around to the back of the building where the students usually sit on the covered lanai. It had glass sliding doors. Sure enough, there was Ipo. She got up and let me in. 

I returned the three Reading Roots books I had borrowed and took ten more. I plan to enter all 48 reading books in the series into my computer to use them with the kids.

   I made idle chatter while I pulled them out. I said I had called the company to ask to buy them, but they only dealt with organizations. From what I’ve heard, I don’t think anyone can just buy the books; it’s a whole teaching program.

   Yesterday, I ran into Misty, Kealakehe’s ESL teacher; she teaches English to students whose parents speak another language. I told her how impressed I was with the series. She agreed; she said they are seeing great progress with their students. This is such good news. I feel a little useless in the face of a good program like this. It reminds me of when the women’s movement started up. I had been advocating for women’s lib forever. Suddenly, everyone was racing past me. My role as forerunner was trampled to the ground in the rush. It took some adjusting. My story changed.

   I finally had the time to visit Paulette and get more water. I wondered how I would make myself visit regularly if I didn’t have the excuse of getting the Kangen water from her. I cherish our time together. Elsa does, too. We spent about an hour there. Then my alarm went off. Paulette had something else to do anyway.

   Adolescent D asked for a 3 p.m. session. He didn’t show up. I’m good with last-minute rescheduling. He doesn’t try to get out of our sessions for the sake of avoiding them. He actually requests work on decoding individual words rather than reading assigned articles. Today, he said he thought the decoding work helped him with his reading. Wow! This is the first, the very first, positive comment he has made on his own. Amazing!

   In the meantime, I had the Twins. I worked with Twin A in the Reading Roots  23. She read it fairly fluently. She had the necessary comprehension but needed to be asked the right questions to produce the correct response.

   I worked with Twin E on handwriting using the sight words list for the second time. I used the 1-50 Fry Sight Word list the first time, on which she had already demonstrated her fluency. It was interesting to watch her work out what the word might be as I wrote the letters in sequence -slowly. Today, we worked on lists 51-100. She stumbled on the 76-100 section. What is she doing with the words she recognizes readily versus the ones she has difficulty with? She obviously can memorize words. How are they stored? How are they retrieved?

   I was reminded of an exercise I did with a boy years ago who had terrible problems learning to read. He’s in his fifties now. He did well enough to get an MBA from Yale. He was a bright kid but not open to change. I developed a game with him that taught me a lot about word recognition. Using plastic letters, I presented him with one letter at a time while he closed his eyes. He had to identify the letter by feeling its shape with his fingers. I gave him three-letter words, usually all in the same word family. Then, he gave me a word to identify.

     He picked out words from the dictionary that he couldn’t read. Before laying the letters out, he told me how many letters were in the word. Then, he laid them out one at a time. We always laid them out in sequence from left to right. Given a seven-letter word, I couldn’t do much with one letter. I found I waited until I had a vowel letter before I felt I could even guess. Many guesses were wrong. I had to make corrections, sometimes several times.

   This handwriting activity might be a variation of that exercise. It was fun for both the student and me. The student not only got to do it himself, but he also got to observe me modeling the process. Brilliant. I have so many students I can do this with. It won’t be multi-sensory as I was with that boy I worked with forty years ago, but it may be as effective. I’m excited.

   I also worked with Twin E on memorizing the sound of the R-controlled, er, ir and ur. Despite the difference in spelling, they make the same sound. I don’t know how many times I have told her that and the Sped teacher has told her that. Why doesn’t that information go in?