Wednesday, July 3, 2024

 Wednesday, July 3, 2024

    I was up before four am this morning. I had slept well, but I was done for the night. I rendezvoused with Elsa on Mike's side of the bed to brush her and check for lesions. Some of the older ones had healed, but newer ones were coming up.  I will switch to the food I'm sure worked when it arrives. If it does work, I will donate the other food I ordered to the Humane Society.

  I woke up without the usual ache in my solar plexus. I wondered what this was about.

   I meditated this morning. I have found one that works to soothe me. I say an affirmation, "I'm safe." I also say, "I love you," addressing my scared, wounded side.  I discovered it alone, but I also heard it mentioned in a podcast yesterday. The podcast speaker talked about the ineffectiveness of affirmations like, "I'm rich," "A successful actress," etc.  He said those affirmations create false selves that don't work.  When you have someone repeat, I am a wealthy, beautiful woman with a wonderful husband, that goes nowhere. It doesn't ring a bell with me. However, I can see it might help change one's personal self-image and make us open to that self as a possibility- if the opportunity comes along. The speaker affirmed, repeating, "I'm safe." That does it for me.

     I met with Mama K's twins at 8:30 this morning. This is our preferred time during school holidays. I met with Twin A first. I dropped working on the Magic Tree House book. It progresses slowly. It is all on one reading level. The passages in the Barnell Loft skill books are short, and I can move up as she progresses. We worked on a mid -third-grade level book. She still can't read multi-syllable words on her own. Not only do I have to break them up with slashes (/), I have to remind her endlessly to decode one syllable at a time instead of trying to figure out the whole word immediately. The word was travel;  she kept reading it as trail. She couldn't ignore the el in the second syllable, reducing the two-syllable word into one.  That's what poor readers do every time.  It drives me nuts. You have no idea how often I've had to say, "Pay attention to one syllable at a time." The good news is that students reading on a first-grade level at eight, nine, and thirteen were reading two-syllable words.

   When I thought about Twin E overnight, I realized she knew she had the wrong word in the center of the bull's eye. She knew where the right one was. Why didn't she choose to use the one she knew was right?  Today, I pointed that out to her. Where in her brain was she experiencing the 'wrong' one in the center of the bull's eye? She pointed to the center of her forehead. Where did she experience the 'right' word?  She pointed to slightly above her left ear.

   I know, I know. Many of you are thinking, "What is she talking about" How can this child know where images are appearing in her brain? The neurons in the brain don't feel anything.  But the blood vessels that run through the brain do. Blood rushes to the part of the brain in use. That's what we can feel. It's not a strong feeling; it's subtle. We have to learn to attend to it.  I teach my students to do it. It gives them the power to change the way their brains work.  It's no more magic than using our bodies differently to correct our posture.

    I asked E if she could pay more attention to the impression she got over her left ear rather than at her forehead. We drilled it one word at a time. I instructed her to look at a word and focus on that spot. When she reported she had heard the word, I said it aloud.  I didn't ask her to say it because that would trigger all sorts of emotional issues. Would she be right? What would I think of her? All the usual anxious thoughts that come up in social situations.  This way, she could put all her energy into focusing on this unfamiliar brain location.  As she reported it, she got all the words correct. Am I sure she did?  What I knew was irrelevant, immaterial, and besides the point. What she knew and felt was important.

  Twin A did something remarkable today. The passage was about a flower that opened at 4 pm every day. It said it helped people tell time in a separate sentence. I asked her how it helped people tell time.  She articulated the relationship. "When the flower opened, people knew what time it was." For good readers, this connection was obvious. But I study how meaning is constructed. The connection is not explicit in this passage. To someone not familiar with using context, the connection is not apparent.

   Before, I studied language intensely to discover how meaning is constructed so I could help my students see what was evident to me, but I hadn't seen it either.  I didn't know what it meant to make an inference. As it wound up, I was a master at inferring. I had to be. My sister acknowledges she was, too. My mother would start a conversation like this, "She did such and such . . ." We wouldn't dare ask who 'she' was. We listened intently for a clue, inferring the identity of the person. To ask my mom what she meant was to incur her ire. 

   She came home one day and announced, "It was so hot out today, I froze at the office." Trained as I was to figure out her meaning, I got it right away. The high summer day temperature made the air conditioning overwork, causing lower temperatures at the office.  Obviously!!!

  After I had worked with the Twins, I called Mama K to tell her about the progress we were making. At the end of first grade, when they were seven, these girls couldn't recognize at least a third of the letters in the alphabet.  They started in preschool at three or four.  They should have been able to identify all the letters in the alphabet by 4. They weren't. They should be reading on at least a fourth-grade level at ten. The school says A is reading at a mid-second-grade level, and E is reading at a low second-grade level.  That means they have made four years of progress in the last three years. If I get them up to a third-grade level, they will have made four years of progress. This is remarkable progress since they made no progress from age 4 to 7.  A is reading reasonably well from mid-third-grade passages now. The remaining problem is decoding multisyllabic words.

     I received a call from Nick at Provision Solar to answer the question I posed last night before I went to bed. When he called, I was in session and asked if I could speak to him later. He said he would be on a sight visit but could speak to me. I called the number he left me yesterday in his text. It was the office phone number, not his cell. I left a message that I would be available until noon. He didn't call.

I had a session with Adolescent D, who is now 17 years old and going into eleventh grade in August.  Our sessions are only 15 minutes at a time as often as possible. We have been working on decoding words exclusively. I don't even know how effective this approach has been. I know he can decode the words more rapidly. I also know he still makes mistakes when decoding multi-syllable words. He invariably misses something if the word is more than two syllables and occasionally if it's just two syllables.  

  I spoke to his mom. I told her how I once anticipated he would be a twenty-eight-year-old living in his parent's house watching videos. He shared my vision. His mom's point of view was very interesting. She talked about a brother-in-law who was 'slow.' Did she think of D that way? Holy cow!! I don't think of anyone that way, even the Twins, whom I am sure the school staff considers 'slow' at best. Just because someone needs to do better academically makes them poor learners in that domain but not necessarily any other.  My husband was considered brilliant by many. I thought he was very bright- he was good at what he was good at. If the prized social skill was singing instead of reading, he would have been considered mentally retarded.  Someone has to show no germ of intelligence to qualify as cognitively impaired. I may get a student who fills that bill. Even then, I want to know what is blocking this poor boy.

   I've hit an interesting problem.  D tries to decode single-syllable VCe words  (a single-syllable word with a vowel + one consonant + a silent e) with a suffix -s as a two-syllable word.  It is confusing. Whenever I see a word like lives, thrives, or tribes, I can safely assume it is not a two-syllable word unless the C in VCe is an s,c =/s/, ch, or sh. Are there base words that look like VCe syllables but are two-syllable words? I can't remember ever seeing one.  Here's a pattern that was never discussed in my Orton-Gillingham training.  Of course, they didn't explicitly push the vowel sound as the cornerstone of every syllable.

  I went to Ulu Wini this afternoon. There were only a few children there. Families had left for the holiday. I can't imagine where they went. Going-into-third-grade MV, going-into-sixth grade ML and going-into-sixth-grade CL were there. I got to work with all three. ML continued with long division. Today, I had her create the problems. She was very uncertain. I wrote the problem, but she had to give me the numbers to write. As she solved the problem, I noticed she had followed all my suggestions. She wrote out the times table on the side of the paper, and when she had to deal with a number smaller than the divisor, she made marks for the amount in the dividend and asked if she could fit the divisor into that number. She only made a mistake on her subtraction, which wasn't even subtraction with regrouping.

   CL tolerated working with me to review subtraction with regrouping, but she didn't want to be there. She had a problem with the addition with regrouping.  I ripped two small pieces of paper off and wrote the tens place number on one and the ones place number on the second. I placed the tens digit in her left hand and the ones in her right. She knew what to do then. When she was finished,  she did what CL had wanted to do, collect a few younger kids and go around the grounds counting objects.- at least that's what I think she's doing. I'm curious to know exactly what she's doing. The kids she leads seem to be happy with the activity. Whatever it is she's doing, it has something to do with numbers. This was a girl who was terrified of math. The more she makes friends with numbers, the better she will be.

 MV is another one who was terrified of math. I reviewed addition and subtraction without and with regrouping. She sailed through the two forms of addition and subtraction without regrouping. She needed a very light brush-up on subtraction with regrouping. I checked place value with her. She flawlessly identified the value of each digit up to 10,000 place. However, she didn't know what the odd and even numbers were. She just arrived from Chuuk last year. She missed all the fundamentals.

   I stopped off at Costco to pick up salad. Costco is on my way whenever I go to town. Yes, it's my go-to place, even if I have to pick up just one item.

  I met with going-into-fourth-grade LG. He had just returned from a 10-day vacation.  He had to use a phone to connect to the Zoom meeting; their computer had a problem. I continued working on third-grade passages in a book in the Barnell Loft skills series. He read most words well, missing a few sight words here and there. Nothing disrupted a meaningful reading. I started working on comprehension and was surprised he couldn't summarize that passage. How much of this was because he really has problems with the skill, and how much of this was due to his anxiety?  I'll find out.

  His father came in at the end of the session. He wanted to know what he could do to follow up. I thought for one second and replied, "Nothing!" This boy was not ready to have an anxious parent pushing him to improve. However, I learned they made a game of reading road signs while in Florida on vacation. What a great way to reinforce his word recognition skills. His dad praised me for my excellent work. After three contact hours, I transformed his child from a non-reader into a reader. His father asked about improving the situation, so his son concentrated on the work more. I assured him his concentration was just fine. When it waivered, I knew his brain couldn't take anymore, and it was time for a rest.

  I was thrilled when his dad complimented my work. It is astounding how little people share it with me. It is only because of my years of experience that I know the students' improvement is due to my work with them. The folks at Ulu Wini seem to recognize it, but they are seeing the impact on multiple kids. A parent sees my work with their child and thinks this is what everyone does.

  I'm still binge-watching Never Have I Ever.