Tuesday, May 7, 2024

 Tuesday, May 7, 2024

    Twenty-six-year-old S was in a bad state of mind again. She reverted to her old strategies of wild guessing based on a few letters.  She read Quick for  Vick, which is an improvement over reading very for Vic; she checked the syllable pattern.  Today, she struggled with the short /e/ vowel sound. When she went to blend it with /l/, she slipped into the long /e/.

   I had nerve testing on my left arm.  My left elbow and pinky fingers are still numb from the elbow reconstruction I had after my fall in June when I  shattered my elbow. Dr. Wong Yi Cheng no! Cheng Wong Yi-! (Her parents had her keep the Chinese way of saying the last name first.) Dr. Cheng stuck needles into me and administered small shocks to determine what nerve paths were blocked. Answer: none.  She showed me the scar, running from the back of my upper arm through the elbow down to the midline of the lower arm. Dr. Cheng praised the stitching. It is truly amazing. The scar was barely visible from the day I left the hospital.  I had never clearly seen the scar from the elbow operation before. Dr. Cheng ran her finger along to highlight it. The doctor said all the nerves along that scar line had been cut.  While nothing was blocking the nerves, they were dysfunctional because of the impact of the incision. It would take years for the nerves to regrow if they ever did. 

    It was a Ulu Wini day.  First-grade JA came to the table for help the moment I sat down. We worked on the 1-25 sight words from the Fry list last time.  Then, she struggled; this time, she got 100% and was ready to work on the next twenty-five words.  She did well on many, only missing, use, by, were, and each.  While it wasn't 100%, it significantly improved over what she did before. She reported improvement in her reading. 

   Fifth-grade RM came over next. We continued working on visualizing the story as it unfolded. She said it had made an immediate difference. I always wonder how much improvement there is in a school objective standard. Any improvement is important. If I've done it right, the students will continue to improve independently.

   Second-grade MV was there. I had to call her over. She was not hostile to working with me but felt too bad about her skill level to initiate a session.  She was still uncertain about identifying the numerals by place value. I discovered today she couldn't count by fives; neither could another child. I was shocked. Is there a problem with pattern recognition among these Marshallese children?  They don't consider patterns. That makes learning by any process other than rote hard. It could be a cultural pattern. There was nothing unfamiliar in their environments.  They knew the foundation of everything they would ever have to learn by age five.   Not anymore. It's not their fault they had to leave their homeland and move to Hawaii.  The USA used the Marshall Islands for bomb testing and made them uninhabitable.

    I finally had second-grade TC. She worked on reading Reading Roots 14. She's still below where she should be. I showed her the VC pattern in three-letter words. She copied every word in the text that conformed to this pattern. She's capable of being a good student because she saw the pattern and explored it. She will be fine.