Sunday, May 26, 2024

 Sunday, May 26, 2024

   My right shoulder and upper arm hurt at night. I knew that could be a sign of a rotator cuff injury. I checked the Internet for possible solutions. They gave a list of causes for my discomfort: rotator cuff injury or tear, tendinitis, or an inflamed bicep. The last one was the most likely since my problems started when the electric lawn mower rolled down the hill and slammed my upper arm into the fence. I was relieved to find this to be a possibility. I am sick and tired of surgeries. I may need another hip replacement. I'm not thrilled; I don't want any more anesthesia. I don't think I will get a hip replacement without it. Maybe if I wait a while, I'll feel differently.

    Darby asked if I applied MakesNoClaims (publicly known as Intrasound).  I was introduced to it by a therapist in the 1990s. I have used it for years on skin tags, burns, pimples, and bruises.  It's close to miraculous. I recently gave a jar to a walking friend who showed me a large keloid scar. For the last ten years, she received steroid shots into the scar tissues every two months. It reduced most of the scar temporarily and eliminated the itching. The scar was flattened in a tiny area. With the Intrasound, the itching was eliminated, and the scar, six inches across and a quarter inch high, was reduced in height. The Intrasound works better than the steroids.  Al, the guy who manufactures and sells it, tells me it works on broken bones; why hadn't I been applying it to my bruised arm?  It's hard for me to believe its effectiveness.  With Darby's push, I started putting it on my right arm and shoulder. 

    At church, the woman with her dog was again on the south patio for the nine a.m. mass. Seeing her makes me think of bringing Elsa. Her dog looks just like her. But then I imagine the two dogs barking at each other for the whole mass. That would be a mess. They could meet beforehand to see if they get along. Elsa is calm around dogs she has had positive contact with.

   I accidentally came across a video of a youngish woman, April McCurtrey, describing three hacks for reading. I watched it. It sounded very much like the one I teach. She introduces the 'pencil tap' method. Students tap on each consonant, twice each vowel, and one or two of the following letters. This goal is getting students to pay attention to each letter so they don't 'guess' the word based on the first letter, a common problem with poor readers. The double tap on the vowel is used so they can stop and determine the syllable pattern to figure out the vowel sound.  The vowel sound is determined by the letters that come after it, not the ones before it.  The vowels are the most significant challenge for readers of English.  She also feels she is teaching students how to learn to read rather than just memorizing phonics rules.  It sounded very much like my method. My first thought was that I could die in peace now.

   My method of teaching reading is novel.  It includes phonics. Unlike McCurtrey, I do not use controlled text, where the student reads only words with the letters and sounds that have been explicitly taught by the teacher.  She argues the need to do that so students know they can trust phonics.  Phonics in English is not trustworthy. It doesn't have a consistent one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds like Italian.  English can be crazy, with its bizarre relationship between letters and sounds. The best that can be hoped for is a statistical likelihood. A letter or combination of letters most likely represents this or that sound, and its inverse: it is unlikely to represent this or that sound.

    English vocabulary is also context-based. What does the word 'cook' mean in this sentence? Is it a noun, a verb, or an adjective? Students must learn to cope with uncertainty if they are going to become good readers of English. We must train our students to cope with uncertainty.

   McCurtrey pointed out that if students don't know how to decode with complete accuracy, they will come up with a pronunciation that makes no sense. That's correct. Then, using the consonants and making a good guess on the vowels, they have to figure out the word in the context of the sentence.  Look at the word every.  It can be decoded as e/v-e/r-y, e/v-e-r/y,   e-v/e-r/y and e-v/e/r-y.  All those are correct ways of decoding the word, and none is pronounced as it is in speech.  Some might say, every is a sight word and should not be taught phonetically. Most words have some letters that accurately represent a sound. 

    We want to use all our mental tools for reading. While none of the decodings I provided would produce the standard pronunciation, students learn to figure it out with the use of context clues. They have to be trained to do this. I have found that the weakest students can learn to do this.

    It poured again today. It's been pouring daily.  It's unusual to have rain that lasts all day, but that's what we've been getting.

    I tried my new Ryobi 10" chain saw on the fallen Bismarck palm frond. I love it. It's easy to handle and light enough for me. I cut off the two ends of the stem: the fan and the buckle.

   After listening to McMurkrey's presentation, I am returning to my roots, the Phoniics discovery System Phase I, figuring out the relationship of the phonemes to the letters that represent them. I did it with Adolescent D.  I don't think I could have done it much sooner. He was resistant to most of my methods. If I'd done it earlier, he would have seen the process as an insult to his intelligence. I have him tell me where to put the dashes, demarking one phoneme from another. It is revealing all sorts of phonics concepts D is still missing.  The process is genius if I do say so my self.

   My Apple Mac Book was lagging again last night; I did what Bailley had done when I brought it in the other day. He thought the problem was caused by the recent update..  he thought Microsoft was sending out updates that would jam Apple Computers. That didn't make much sense to me. If they are doing this, it's goodbye to Microsoft programs. I'll switch to Google Docs.  I had to perform a Force Quit and a Restart every hour tonight.

  I heard a Podcast on love. The speaker described the difference between Romantic love and maternal/paternal love. Romantic love is self-involved. The other persons love for us allows us to love ourselves ina highentened way. That always fades because as with all moods, we slip back too a default level. What happens when the blinders of first love fall from our eyes. How do we relate to each other then?  The speaker said we switch not into a platonic mode but into a maternal/paternal mode in which we become caretakers for each other. Darby told me it took ten years of marriage before she started thinking about what would be best for Patrick; she married when she was twenty-two.  I was thirty-two when I met Mike.  What allowed me to become a caring partner?  I learned to take care of my boundaries and say no without compunction. As I got better at it, I learned to say it gently but decisively. I also leanred to not only ask for what I wanted, but more importantly to cope with not getting what I wanted. To this day, the most painful part of not getting what I want is when I'm preventing it. I can live with not getting it, but not my own interference.