Tuesday, July 23, 2024

 Tuesday, July 23, 2024

  I trimmed the mock orange shrub, which stands over 10' high at the driveway's edge.  No, I didn't trim the top.  I cut dead branches at my height. Besides stimulating growth at the level, it allows me access to the weeds growing at the base of the shrub, particularly the haole koas. I used my 6-inch chain saw. It did great, and then it started balking. When I plugged in the battery, it was fully charged. I don't know why it was acting that way.

   Casey finally came by today to trim the dead fronds off the palm trees and trim the overgrown hedges.  He brought a chain saw on an extension pole to get the dead growth on the Bismarck palm. The rest can be taken down with a manual saw blade on an extension rod.  These fronds are huge.  Their full length is on the order of 8 feet, and their width is a good 5 feet. I need a chain saw to cut through the stems and cut off the sheathes.  I started with my six-inch chain saw. It worked better than it had earlier. Then, the blade wouldn't run anymore. I saw the teeth had jumped the track. Perhaps that's what happened yesterday. I couldn't get it back on.  I texted B before I went to bed. I asked him if he could fix it for me. I got a yes before the lights were out that night.

   I met with the Twins. E reported that the part of her memory with the correct answer had moved from an outer ring to the second from the center, where the one with the wrong answer had already been. The other day, she explained the difference: one recalled the word correctly and remembered the words incorrectly. Today, she described them differently. The difference was one recalled them automatically and often incorrectly, and the other decoded the words. Back to the drawing board.  I'm not too concerned.

    Each time we discuss how her mind works, E learns something new. She has to analyze it and categorize its functions. Then, we have to discuss solutions to improve its function. I am teaching her how to think. I don't consider a minute of such a discussion a waste, even if we never fix her memory problem.  Assuming our whole world doesn't go to hell in a handbag shortly, someone will solve the problem she's having.    A pill, electrical stimulation, or a teaching technique will be developed to deal with issues like hers.  The other option is we will all be living in a nation-state resembling North Korea, and all her reading problems will be trivial.

    As we decode the words on the page in our session, she has to tell me where to put the slashes, indicating syllable division, and where the dashes, indicating phonemes.  So, in the word where, she has to say, "Put a dash between h and e."   She said, "Put a dash between e and h."  She couldn't understand why saying it the second way wasn't as good as the first since it was also true.  Of course, she was right. To determine the syllable division, either is correct. However, students need to maintain the left to right movement in reading.  They can start in the middle of a word but must always have a left-to-right orientation. For example, in the word grand, you have to start with the an and then the larger unit of and before adding on the gr.  Gr can only be added as a unit if it is clear that g and r represent two sounds, not one, as some teachers teach.  I'm unsure why this process works, but I know every discipline uses it. 'If you want to improve, go back to the basics.' The basics of reading is the relationship of the phoneme to the letter(s) that represent it. Refreshing that concept helps everyone at every level improve. How do I know? When I prepared a tape recording for my students in 1995, it immediately improved my reading skills. I was stunned.

    Twin A was up and available this morning.  I have her working on the same decoding process I use with Adolescent D, but at a lower level.  She tends to ignore the letters in the word. The school said she needs more phonics training. That is not her big problem. She can usually decode a word. Her problem is she would prefer to guess using one or two letters in a word instead of all the letters.

This method of decoding every word in a text is the process I use when I work with total nonreaders, like Adolescent D when he was fourteen and reading at a first-grade level. It is time to introduce it again but at a higher, vastly more complex level. Instead of decoding Gail Carpenter's 'Sassy the Cat', we are decoding sixth-grade material with multi-syllable words. He has to remember the rules.  His improvement sometimes makes my toes curl. He, on the other hand, while he sees the improvement, is unimpressed.

   The rest of the day was devoted to cleaning the house. I  continued watching Call the Midwife.