Friday, June 7, 2024

Friday, June 7, 2024

 

   The acupuncturist came at 10 am. She worked on my upper back and sore wrists from typing and playing endless games of Free Cell.

   I continued contracting my chest muscles and reaching my arms forward to straighten my thoracic spine and realign my neck.  Maybe I don't use the nonexistent muscles on the ventral side of my cervical spine.  It's the muscles on either side of the front of my neck. It eliminates my double chin but adds folds at the base of my neck. I don't think I will fool anyone into thinking I'm under forty.

  I worked with Mama K's Twins today. While reading the updates from last year, I saw the girls hadn't made that much progress.  I was anticipating they would be reading at a third-grade level then.  They do- sort of. A's comprehension is good. But she lacks fluency. She reads slowly.  Today, I got what the problem was. She couldn't relax and allow automatic processing to take over.  She has that tight, conscious grip on the reading process from over-reliance on phonics.  I don't know if she had a choice. It was hard to get anything into her long-term memory. It required endless repetition. Both girls had terrible memory problems.

   I started working with Twin E on comprehension. She has already made some progress, inferring the correct word from a well-decoded word that resulted in a different pronunciation. This is a significant step. I started giving her three choices:

1. The real word.
2. One that sounded somewhat like it but made no sense in context.
3. One that neither sounded anything close to what those letters might represent nor made sense in the context of the text.

    Yay!! Adolescent D is beginning to pay attention to the syllables in a word rather than try to decode a multi-syllabic word one phoneme at a time. That doesn't work.  We always read one-syllable units and figure out how they fit together.  The phrase "It is a…"  are three single-syllable words. However, they are said as a single word.  As I said, we're always reading one syllable at a time and figuring out how to connect them.

   I had my third appointment with third-grade LG.  His mom was off to the side now. She's too anxious to be helpful when LG is working with me.  I continued with the phonemic analysis. I don't have to do much. LG has picked up the ball and is running with it. At the end of the session, he declared, "This is fun!" He is having more fun than me at this point. I feel restless in the sessions. I don't know why.  LG will be leaving soon for a 10-day vacation.  I asked him if he would be willing to fit in a third session with me before his vacation. He said yes. Wow! This is an impressive turnaround.

   After the session, I spoke briefly with his mom, who readily agreed to a third session. I told her getting him to read better shouldn't take long unless there was a glitch I hadn't detected yet. LG loves the process. That means he'll do it on his own. From my perspective, I've done my job already. What's left is saving him time by telling him what I know about phonics.  That will be a time saver, but he will learn it all more quickly if he learns it on his own.

   I went to Ulu Wini today.  I called fifth grade RM, who I discovered couldn't do subtraction with regrouping, to work with me. Without any additional effort on any adult's part, Fifth-grade LY and ML joined us. They all needed help with subtraction with regrouping. Fifth-grade ML blew my mind, getting me to see something differently. I gave her 306-165=. Her answer was zero when she subtracted six from zero (0-6) in the tens place. Wow! Of course, she's right.   If you ask someone to give you six candies, and they have none to give you, you wind up with none or zero.  How to explain the concept of the negative number.  It's the first leap from the concrete to the abstract.  Sticking to the concrete perspective, if I have 5-6, the answer is 5.  If I go to someone and ask for six candies, and they only have five to give me, I wind up with five. Therefore, the answer to 5-6 is 5.  Wow!   The book" Is Math Real?" opened my mind to this perspective. I love it!

  Isaac and I had another long conversation. We do that well. He's working to figure out what he wants in a life partner.  He evaluates his parents' marriage and says it's not perfect.  He must have used the word perfect in the negative over five times in our conversation. He's struggling to define his own needs. I told him not to judge his parents' marriage for their sake but only to use it as a guide to help him determine what he wants for himself. Facing his constant use of the word perfect, I said if he used it one more time, I'd wash out his mouth with lye soap.  The word perfect should be used only in one context -when declaring something is perfect as is. The search for perfection is doomed to failure. Perfection is unfattenable. If that's your goal, you will fail almost by definition.

   I started watching Outer Range on my friend Jean's recommendation. The actors are fantastic, the dialogue is good, and the plot is interesting so far.