Monday, September 23, 2024

Monday, September 23, 2024

 

  I didn't wake up feeling up-and-at-it this morning. My temperature was slightly elevated, from 96.8 to just below 99.  I got myself up and out of bed anyway. I did my morning upper body exercises before Elsa and went for a walk. 

   I found an instructional video on the We Both Reach for the Gun dance meme.  The instructions were wonderfully clear. I was surprised by how difficult it was to follow the moves. I did it easily when I thought of the first sequence as running in place.  I can call up on my muscle memory from my youth.  My plan is to video my performance and post it on YouTube.  Hopefully, other octogenarians will join me.

  I usually use Yahoo as my email site, but I also have a Gmail account. I try the Gmail account when the Yahoo site doesn't allow me access or recognize the recipient's name, and sometimes, that doesn't work either.  

   Yesterday, when I went to Gmail, it announced my storage was 99% full and I should buy more.  I deleted all my old emails, most of which were advertisements. But there were one or two that were significant.  I found one from Blogger.com telling me my With Mike; Without Mike account was now under Square Space. 

    I actually had two sites under Blogger.com. One Mike's Death; Betty's Life, which went up to September 20, 2019. The second was With Mike; Without Mike, which was up-to-date. I had over 63,000 hits on the first and over 100,000 on the second.  The readership on the second dropped to zero recently. I thought it might be because I wasn't posting new entries around the time of my accident in 2023, but that couldn't have been the problem. I hadn't made a new entry in Mike's Death, Betty's Life, since 2020, and it had regular hits. I thought the problem might be that Square Space realized I had two accounts while I only paid for one and shut one down.  But the transfer happened in February, and the hits stopped dead in May.  Also, only the second account has been transferred to Square Space.  I have no idea what is going on. I started downloading all the entries into Mike's Death; Betty's Life, since it is the one that still gets hits.

   The woman who called me last week to say her seventh-grade daughter, RH, has been diagnosed with dyslexia finally texted me back. When she called last week, I was in the middle of Covid.  I texted her today to say I was much better and that she should call to make an appointment.  Then, I had a devastating moment when I thought she had changed her mind and wouldn't want to hire me.  it inspired me to get off my duff and advocate for myself. I prepared an ad for Craig's List. 

  In anticipation of working with MH,  I had a great time thinking of how I would approach the stated problem, orthographic perception. I already started reviewing all the strategies I had learned had developed to deal with the problem.

   One of the strategies I developed was for the student to write down the word the way it was spelled on the page in one column and how they saw it in their head in another, two different images for the same word.  Believe it or not, it worked like a charm for several students.  

   I found a video of Dehaene's on YouTube explaining how the brain reads. He confirmed one of my theories on why people had problems processing the letters. The information goes to the primary visual cortex for processing. It uses the part of the brain designed to recognize faces. That part of the brain gives two views of the face: one from the left and one from the right, which are slightly different. Both of these views are correct images of the face. However, the brain also produces two images of letter sequences.  The reader must recognize that, in words, one is right and one is wrong and reject the wrong one. Many students don't do this. They hold both images, the image of IMAGE and EGAMI.  

   I spoke to my niece. Her seven year old son does not want to learn phonics. To say he is resistant would be an understatement. I've done a little work with him to no avail.  I assume he has an auditory processing problem of some sort. That would make hearing the phonemes pronounced irritating, somewhat like stroking a cat against the fur.   I've developed a method for helping students overcome that irritation. Nothing I did worked with him.  He is a particularly stubborn young man in most areas of his life.   he can also be a delight. 

   His mom thinks he plans to learn to read by memorizing every word.  That was the teaching method used when I learned to read, The Whole Word Method, using the Dick and Jane Book Series.  The theory was that we learned to recognize words by seeing them repeatedly. My second-grade teacher, Mrs. Rooney, said, "Boys and girls, look for the little words in the big words." After immediately rejecting that as a ridiculous idea because OR in the word FOR didn't mean what it meant when it stood alone, I got it.  It worked like a charm for me. Maybe this will work for my grandnephew too.  If his memory is good, he can learn all the syllable units. Then, all he has to do is add on the initial sounds. I think this is how I learned to read. I only learned to decode as an adult in my fifties.  My reading speed increased dramatically after that.  We don't know all our brain does to process the letters and convert them into meaning.  Many think that because they read fast, their brains don't use phonics to figure out words. Phonics is only a slow, laborious process.  It's a theory, and I'm afraid I must disagree.

   I had a session with fourth grade LG this afternoon. I asked him to identify the long and short vowel sounds. He didn't have a clue.   I reminded him that the long vowels made their own names, which is a trick to remind students of the long vowel sound.  He couldn't hold on to the long vowel sound when blending. He could do it easily when I reminded him to use crossbody blending.  The process is not in his muscle memory yet.  I reintroduced the VC and VCe syllable patterns. He could not keep the categories or the information within the categories straight.  Okay. We're going to start again.  His reading is light years better than it was, but there is something wrong with how he processes information that is not fully embedded. If he has to use conscious recall, he gets lost.  I plan to follow up on this lesson on Wednesday.