Monday, November 18, 2024
I had a good night's sleep. I was in bed by 9:30. I got up at least once to pee, woke up later just enough to check the time around 3:30, and was happy to go back to sleep. I finally got up shortly before five.
I got a text from Clyde saying Chi Qigong was canceled. I was going to spend some time on the beach taking in that view anyway. I started my car and saw only three bars on my electric charge. That wouldn't be enough to get me to town and back. I had plugged the car in, but something went wrong, and the car hadn't charged. I even got an announcement that the charge had failed. I went back in the house. I was a bit disoriented. I had three chores planned after the Chi Qioong. It gave structure and purpose to my morning.
I had a session with Shelly at ten. She had started advocating that I leave a troubling situation that caused me grief. She expressed concern about the impact on my nervous system. In a bad situation, you must choose between two unpleasant possibilities, preferably with the least negative consequences. I've faced that in some meaningful relationships. In those cases, separation was the least painful choice. At least I didn't have to face the pain daily as I would if I had to deal with the person regularly.
In this case, the least onerous choice was to stick with it. I wanted help learning to self-comfort so I could deal with the situation sensibly, ignoring what I don't absolutely have to pay attention to. I want to learn compartmentalization and denial. I think this comes easily if you've given up hope of ever repairing the relationship when there's no way to resolve the problems in a mutually amenable way. Oh, well. So sad. But there's nothing I can do about it.
As if my day wasn't upset enough as it was, fourth-grade LG's mom canceled his session. I was looking forward to it, too. His mother texted their family therapist, who had an opening. From what I've seen, this is a family needing therapy.
I worked on formatting an exercise for seventh-grade LV to help with her comprehension. I always start with sentence comprehension. This is ignored in the regular classroom setting. I've heard professionals pooh-pooh the need for such a thing. They think everyone should understand a complex sentence if they speak English. Boy, are they off the wall? Sentence comprehension is tough. Most students grasp the content words (nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs) and create a story. Some students don't understand how the words within a single sentence interrelate; many don't understand how one sentence relates to the others in the paragraph or from one paragraph to the next. They fumble through the text like a blind person navigating an unfamiliar room. They have some skills, but they wind up bumping into something along the way.
How do I teach sentence comprehension? I ask questions about the sentence using four categories. In The Book, Think & Search, The Author& Me, and Beyond the Text. In the book looks easy to anyone who can do it, but you would be surprised. Underlying this is a fundamental understanding of the way language works. It is very complex.
Let's take a sentence I just wrote. Other sentences are much more complex, and formulating appropriate questions can be challenging. But thinking about it as a question-and-answer exchange helps with comprehension.
I ask questions about a sentence using four categories.
In the Book.
- Who asks questions about a sentence using four categories? I
- What does 'I' do? Ask questions about a sentence using four categories.
- What are questions "I" asks about? (This is an ambiguous question.) A sentence
- How many categories are there? Four
Think & Search:
- Who does 'I' refer to? The narrator. The person who performed the action in the sentence. (I is one of the more difficult subjects when not in quotation marks.)
- Categories of wh
- What are the questions about?
The Author & Me:
- What is a sentence
Beyond the Text: I can't think of anything in this category now.
We're already in an order of complexity here to which I would never subject a student below third grade. I use very simple sentences with younger children that involve characters and action and are written in the third person narrative.
I spent time checking updates in Grammarly.
I started with a new client today, sixth grade GV. His grandmother saw my ad on Next Door. She worked with him on his spelling last year. The boy struggled. His reading was better than his spelling, but he often reversed letters. Grandma had to check with her daughter. She anticipated GV might object, but the opposite was true. He was looking forward to our sessions.
I started the session as I always do when I meet a new client. I asked him to tell me something he enjoyed doing or did well, and he said he enjoyed reading. Wow! He likes stories. Then I asked him to tell me something he did well. He was hesitant. I told him anything he did well, including cutting his toenails. I suspected he thought I meant an academic subject. His answer was draw. Children who have difficulty reading often are good at drawing. It suggests the problem is overuse of the right side of the brain.
Then I asked him what he wanted help with. He surprised me by saying keeping his focus. That's a problem with attention, something his grandma didn't mention. I determined he was easily distracted by something in the environment, not his own thoughts. The former is much easier to resolve than the latter. I taught him the 'bull's eye' exercise.
I draw a bull's eye to represent the attentional system. The things we are most focused on are in the center of the bull's eye. However, a lot of additional data is coming in, such as the sounds of animals, other humans moving about, or the wind moving through the trees. That type of attention dysfunction is often easy to fix. I told him he had my voice in the center of the bull's eye. The chickens squawking in the background should be on one of the outer rings. For him, those chickens flew right into the center of the bull's eye.
I taught GV the 'pinball' exercise. You pull back and shoot the pesky noise right back to one of the outer circles. It worked well for him at the moment. I could feel his mind quiet. I told him to continue practicing it.
Then, I had him read a passage from the Barnell Loft Drawing Conclusion C booklet, my go-to text. He stumbled badly on the multi-syllable words. Well, I knew what we had to do. I taught him the multi-step procedure for decoding words of more than one syllable.
Step 1 is identifying the vowel letters, VL. GV couldn't name them off the top of his head. I worked on learning the names of the vowel letters in order: _, eiou, a_iou, ae_ou, _, eiou a_iou, ae_ou, aei_u. I also showed him the "I owe you" trick. I used that when I memorized the names in order. I still refer to it, although I doubt I need it.
The second step was to identify which of the vowel letters represents sounds. Since it is one syllable for every sounded vowel, this is important. The third step is separating the vowel sounds into their own syllables. The vowels are the cornerstones of the syllables. Everything follows the vowel.
Once the words are divided into syllables, the reader has to decode and blend each syllable as if it's a separate word. Only then should the student blend all the syllables in the word. It's as unlikely as it is likely that the decoded word will produce the sound of the word the way it is produced in everyday speech. There is no way to know how a word might be pronounced from the written word in English. however, you can get close enough to figure out the meaning in context. GV looks like he's going to be a pleasure to work with.
Around 3:30 or 4 pm, I got to work with the Twins. Their mother was at work. She called home to see if their dad could set them up. I've been using the original Phonics Discovery System method with Twin A. Working on a sentence at a time, analyzing every word for its syllable division, and the sound of each phoneme and the letter(s) that represent them. She finally said she saw an improvement in her reading. With Twin E, I continued letting her take the lead with the decoding, not adding the analysis of the seven-syllable patterns.
I felt like I did little to nothing when I did do something. I called Margo, posted three ads, and taught three students. But I'm not busy enough to keep me happy. Like my mother, I like to work hard. I'm reasonably sure it's throwing myself into an activity that calms me. That way, I'm moving at the same rate as my anxiety. I guess there are two ways of dealing with it: outrun or deny it. Coming to terms with fear is such hard work.
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