Thursday, June 27, 2024

 Thursday, June 27, 2024

  I had both girls today. This work is getting more and more exciting. I love working with people who have difficulty. I love thinking about how the mind works. Because I believe in neural plasticity, I focus on how the brain can change to improve at any cognitive task.  The work with these girls is becoming more interesting, and I have a greater grip on the job. I love it.

   With Twin E, much of it is memory, but there is more. Observation and logical thought are beyond her. I have worked on the same sentence and the same word with Twin E for several sessions. Whenever we encounter the word road, we must start from scratch. Each time, we begin again through the steps for decoding the word. She can tell me that oa are both vowels. When two vowels are together, do they usually make one sound or two?" I teach phonics as a form of statistical possibility, not certainty.  If you want certainty, move to Italy. "What sound is the oa combination likely to make? Could it make a long /e/ sound? She said yes. There were a lot of words with the letter o in the passage.  I went through each one with her and asked if any of those o letters represented the e sound.  She saw that none of them made that /e/ sound. She also recognized the e in these made that long /e/ sound.

   Back to the original question: what sound might the oa make? She offered up the short o. Pretty good.  Did she know the long /o/ sound? She thought about it and retrieved it. Great. Now, we had the long /o/.  "Let's blend the long /o/ with the following sound." She thought the a would make the next sound, despite my having told her repeatedly that the two vowels together only represented one sound.

  I can hear many of you saying, "Is she stupid?" In conventional terms, absolutely. I'm sure all her teachers see her that way. It's not the way I think. I've only met two people in my life that I felt comfortable calling stupid and dismissing any possibility of them learning anything. The was a boy I worked with in NJ who was so mentally inadequate he wasn't able to get himself to school. Then, there was an adult I worked with in NYC. She may have been mentally deficient or just ignorant and arrogant, but the combination was impressive. Everyone else, I assume there's a block that can be broken through. I can help them improve. There are cases where I've brought some students from way behind to honor classes in high school. That's where teaching comes in. If the problem is with the brain, because it's plastic, it can be molded.  I love the puzzle of figuring out what the block is and how to overcome it. Impenetrable blocks exist in all of us, usually because we refuse to change.  We overidentify with whatever we are in the moment.

   I am working on a chapter book with Twin A, The  Magic School House Dolphins at Daybreak. We're working on 'fluency,' oral reading that approximates conversational speech. Some teachers think it has to do with speed; it doesn't. It has to do with the intonational pattern.  Someone can read the words rapidly without an appropriate intonation pattern and sound like a bad reader or at least a non-English speaker.  She has made some strides. 

   Today, A got stuck on the word tallest, a multisyllable word. I asked her to identify the vowel letters. She did that with ease. "Do they both make a sound?"  No. Only the a.  I can understand her confusion. The e in the suffix-ed often is silent. One rule for determining if a vowel is sounded is whether it stands between two consonants. An easy guide. But then there's the -ed rule. Oh, well. Did she know what a consonant was?  No. I probably covered it at some point.  It's not a bit of information that is useful as we age. I started writing out the alphabet.  Then, I had her dictate it to me. She did not know the alphabet by the end of first grade. She had some difficulty. It didn't flow smoothly.

     Moreover, when I gave her hi, she couldn't go on from that point.  Of course, that rock-solid knowledge of the alphabet is no longer necessary when you can look up a word on the Internet.  In my day, you had to find a word in a bound dictionary. You had to know how to locate a word in the morass of words.  

    Did she understand that a word could have more than one vowel sound? She said no. She may not have understood the question in the first place.  Once it was clear there were two sounded vowels in the word tallest, the next question was where to put the syllable division. The rule is the syllable division has to fall somewhere between the two vowels. I have marked all the spots that fill that requirement with question marks: t-a?l?l?e-s-t.  She chose to do tall/est.  A perfect functional division.  If she had done ta/llest, I may have intervened because a useful subrule is that every syllable should look like an English word. Of course, in this case, her division wouldn't have interfered with her figuring out the word.  It's English! What can I say! I find it fascinating.

   I had an appointment with my doctor at 9:30. I needed to get my blood pressure checked, and I wanted to talk to her about my osteoporosis.  I thought my blood pressure would be through the roof. Something upsetting happened yesterday that had me in tears. It was still impacting me. I worked on building my CO2 ratio, believing that it would lower my BP. It registered at 129/83, which is hardly high, especially since I hadn't taken my medication in the morning.

  I told the doctor about my theory of CO2's calming effect. Lutz had poo-pooed any ideas about its soothing benefits. He insisted that people with panic attacks breathe into paper bags not to calm themselves but to rebalance their O2 and CO2 ratio. Dr. Reed confirmed my theory. CO2 is known to activate the parasympathetic system. I wondered how Lutz would respond when I told him.

   The doctor gave me the results of my last bone density test. While I had been stable for years, I lost bone mass over the last year. Why? It could be because I spent a month with limited physical activity, at least three weeks of it exclusively flat on my back. It could be because others were feeding me and the diet change impacted me, or it could have been because I didn't take any supplements for several months.  It took me a long time to get back on the horse in big and little ways.   My first update after the fall was on July 1. That doesn't look that bad now. I'm surprised I started it up again that quickly. My arm was in a sling, and my left hand was numb; it still hadn't fully recovered. For my osteoporosis, she recommended vitamin K2 -7 and referred me to an endocrinologist. Dr. Reed is the best doctor on the planet. A wonderful, caring person, a brilliant diagnostician, always up to date on the latest treatments, and cautious about medicinal solutions when others are available. My kind of gal.

    I immediately drove to Island Naturals to pick up some of that vitamin K2, which is supposed to act as a traffic cop directing where the calcium should go and not go. Someone there was there to help me. He also took K2 and recommended a company he thought was a reliable manufacturer. I also picked up some fresh orange raspberry strudel bites—yum.

      It was a Ulu Wini day.  I introduced subtraction with regrouping to going-into- third-grade MV. When I started with her last week, she went brain-dead and suffered a freeze response whenever I talked about math.  Since then, we have progressed through addition without and with regrouping and subtraction without regrouping. She demonstrated she was secure with all three. Today, I introduced subtraction with regrouping, 23-19=.  I used the rods to demonstrate the process.  I crossed out the 2, replaced it with a 1, added the 1(10) to the 3, making it 13, and successfully subtracted the 9 from the 13. Then, I didn't understand why I was left with 1-1=0.  Here I was, dealing with a subtraction problem I had mastered in second grade and executed flawlessly for most of the last 76 years.

    Was I losing it?  

     My mind is sensitive to my students and views the problem through their eyes.  I like that this happens to me. I can see the confusion from their point of view. As I resolve my confusion, it helps them resolve theirs.  I asked MV if she noticed I asked questions about my confusion and the problem. Yes, she had. Did she do that when she was confused? No, she didn't. She just passively waits for someone to solve the problem for her. I told her it makes her a poor learner. If she holds the question in her mind, she opens it for learning. I didn't use those words. She wouldn't have understood them on a bet. She is still struggling to learn English, and as I found out today, she doesn't speak her native language very well either.

   When she completed her math work, I asked her if she wanted to take it home to show her parents. She said no. The children often say no with sad faces.  I asked her what the word for excellent was in Chuuk. She didn't know. How about very good? She didn't know. How about good? She didn't know. She explained she had trouble learning Chuuk because she is not pure-blood Chuuk. Holy cow!  I tried to explain to her that I would have learned Chuuk if her parents had raised me.  This girl has one lollapalooza of an auditory processing problem.  I have my work cut out for me.

   I chuckled at her explanation of her poor Chuuk language skills. Many years ago, I heard a story about a parent who never spoke to her son. The school advised her to talk to him more. She said she didn't because he only understood Spanish because his dad had been Spanish. She thought language acquisition was genetically transferred. Oh, boy! Maybe her parents really believe this. Perhaps they told her this to explain her poor language skills.

   I did another problem with MV.  I asked her the value of 2 in 26. She didn't have a clue.  Okay. My way of introducing place value is as a game. I lay out plaques with the numbers 1, 10, and 100 written on them, preferably on the floor, so the kids can move from one place to the next. In this case, they were just boxes randomly distributed over an 8 x 11 piece of paper.  On a smaller piece, I wrote the number 5. I moved the 5 from one place to the next. She had no trouble understanding the value of the 5 in each place. Then, I wrote the boxes in sequence on a horizontal plane. She had no idea what that meant. I said, "It's the same thing, just in a different order." Nothing. Was she unable to see the relationship between the two presentations?  Was she unable to see the relationship because she had developed an aversion response to anything she had already seen in school?  I went over it repeatedly, only changing the number in the ones place. She got it. When I changed the numeral in the tens place from a 2 to a 3, she could tell me it represented  30.  I did more, showing hundreds and thousands of places. She followed reasonably well.  I find this kind of work mind-blowing and mind-stretching. I have to understand how someone else views something differently from me. I love it. It's the most exciting work in the world.

   Going-into-sixth-grade ML joined us today for the first time in a long time. She continued working on long division. 600 divided by 200 using repeated subtraction instead of the division algorithm I learned. She forgot to use subtraction with regrouping. She redid the problem correctly without further assistance when I pointed it out.  I asked her if she wanted to learn the standard algorithm. Yes. I gave her 76 divided by 5.  I walked her through it. She caught on pretty quickly. Then I gave her 5268 divided by 5.  "I can't do that!"  I covered the six and eight and had her do what she could. Then, I exposed the six. Oh, she had no problem. I asked her if she wanted to take it home to her parents. She said no. Most of these parents can't read. Their elementary school-age children act as their translators.  I asked her if her mother wanted her to do well at school. Does she understand it when you tell her you have done well?  She wasn't sure. I wrote 'Excellent' on the paper and signed it "Auntie Betty." I told her to show her mom and report her mother's reaction. These poor parents feel so helpless. The difference between their life on those Micronesian islands and here is enormous; it's like landing on a different planet.

  Going-into-sixth-grade CL also worked with me. She continued working on subtraction with regrouping, using Cuisenaire rods to assist her. The significant change was getting her to write the changes on the problem as she worked with the rods.  Once she did that, she was fine on her own.