Thursday, January 4, 2024

Thursday, January 4, 2024

 

     I had an occupational therapy appointment this morning. It's slow progress. She told me she could not help me with the nerve damage. The hand exercises would only help increase my range of motion, not the numbness or swelling. I had an appointment with Shelly immediately after my OT appointment. I talked to her while sitting in the parking lot of the rehab facility. I was exhausted after that. I went home and napped.

   Later in the afternoon, I tutored at Ulu Wini, a low-income development. One of the employees has her son work with me. He's a bright, energetic child. The school says he has problems with reading. 

Reading is not his problem. His problem is impatience and concentration. He races through the activity, happy to rewrite the text to his satisfaction and give whatever he thinks the answer should be without concern for the author's input. I gave him the letter-naming activity. We both saw the same text. He and I took turns saying the letters as quickly as possible. Our turn was over when we made a mistake. It's a game. The objective is to train the eye to see the letters. Concentration can improve with this exercise because the activity's game aspect will carry over. Also, doing this activity trains the mind to process the letters faster. I threw in one lesson on decoding multisyllabic words. At the end of the session, he said, "You know, you could be a teacher." Got to love it.

  At the end of two hours, I had worked with six students.

  I found the Three Pines videos. TV series based on Louise Penny's detective stories. It is very loosely based on her series. Characters are dropped altogether or radically changed. It was still pretty good. Whatever it was, it was lightyears better than those series with violence and perverse characters.