Monday, October 14, 2024

 Monday, October 14, 2024 

     While I walked this morning, I heard a chorus of howling dogs.  Dan lives on the corner of Kukuna and Holoholo and has six dogs. When they let loose, it’s impressive.  This was the first time I heard them in full throat, triggering every other dog in the immediate neighborhood. My friend Elaine, who lives on Holoholo, hears it more often than I do.  I only heard it today because I was on the highest point in our immediate neighborhood. 

    It was just Clyde and me for Chi Qigong this morning. It was spectacularly low tide. The lowest I’ve ever seen it at that hour of the morning.  While we were going through the asanas, two men passed, heading for the water. Each held a black puppy. Oh, boy.  I asked to hold one. The poor thing started shaking.  They were a month old, and the men were taking them for their first swim.  I didn’t challenge them, asking them in God’s name how a one-month-old puppy could benefit from this.  The puppies were a pitbull-Chihuahua mix.  The female was the Chihuahua. Yikes.  The men said they tried to keep the two dogs separate but failed.

   I stopped off briefly at Target simply because I was right there. I picked up a jar of red raspberry jam I had forgotten the other day. Then, I checked the Haagen Das stock. The sale was over, but I spotted a pint of Vanilla Bean.  I was still hunting for that old Haagen Das vanilla ice cream. Judy told me the vanilla bean might be it. When I checked out, I discovered the computer hadn’t been informed that the sale had ended. I was sorry I hadn’t picked up a second pint.

    I got home around 9:30. When I checked my texts, I discovered the fourth-grade MH’s dad had set an appointment for 10 am.  We continued working on Stuart Little. I was alarmed to see MH making reading mistakes I hadn’t seen her make in over a year. She said she wasn’t feeling well.  This particular passage gave us plenty of opportunity to work on using context clues to develop vocabulary.  

    When students encounter unfamiliar words, I ask them to give a ‘logical’ substitute for that word. I believe this is the best way to develop vocabulary. You figure out a possible meaning in one context. In each context, the word has a slightly different meaning. The reader develops a sense of what that word might mean, a prototype.

   Immediately after that session was over, I hopped back into the car to meet my friend Jean in town to help her find Goodwill in the Old Industrial area. I tried to give her directions over the phone, but she had trouble picturing them. It was easiest to just drive down there and meet her.

       When I arrived, she was still in Target.  I suggested we go in her car instead of taking both of them. As I suspected, there were no parking spots in the section by Goodwill.  I offered to drive the car around while she shopped.  A space opened up shortly after she went into the store.  She picked one ‘pillow’ designed for an infant with a depression in the middle of two bolsters. She wanted the pillow to protect her thirty-five-pound cement angel she packed in a duffle bag. It would travel on the plane along with golf clubs and rifles. The bolster she bought didn’t work out. She wrapped her angel in her clothes for protection.  

    Jean treated me to lunch afterward at Ultimate Burger. I know that’s Yvette’s favorite.  We shared one well-done burger and some delicious fries.  It was perfect.  Afterward,  Jean drove me to the Target parking lot and took me to my car. I went home for a nap.

   I had the Twins at 3:30.  I had Twin A first. I work exclusively on the visualization exercise. I started with a long word with seven letters, GROOVES. She told me when she felt she had the word properly embedded in her visual working memory.  When she spelled the word for me from her VWM, she deleted the R.  Ah, that’s why she was having problems.  She deleted letters. Ah, I understood her problem.  She doesn’t process all the letters in a long word.

    The working memory only can process 7 pieces of information at a time, plus or minus 2, which means it can process between 5 and 9 pieces of information. That’s its limit. Of course, we feel like we do more. The alphabet has 26 letters in it. We recall it quickly using chunking.  We learn the letters in groups: ABCD, EFG, HIJK, LMNOP, QRS, TUV, and WXYZ. That’s seven bits of information with between three and five bits embedded in each chunk.  

   I learned the process of visualizing letters about 40 years ago at a Neuro-Linguistic Programming activity.  The leader advertised it as something that helped people improve their spelling.   I had trouble holding more than five letters when I started doing it.  I just closed my eyes, pictured the word SECURELY, eight letters, and easily read the letters backward off the image in my mind.  It sounds like a party trick, but it helps improve our reading and spelling.

   Once Twin A announced she had the image of the targeted word securely embedded in her mind’s eye, I moved the text so she couldn’t see the word. I asked her to spell the word. Then, I asked her to tell me one letter at a time. What is the first letter? The second? The third, etc?  Then, I asked her to identify random letters. What is the third letter?  The fifth? In order to do this quickly, the image has to be clearly visible in her mind’s eye.  I went through the text, asking her to do this exercise with each word.

    Then I had Twin E.  Unlike Twin A, who was initially the better reader, she had been applying the process with deliberation as we worked in our sessions.  Twin E said she was seeing a big difference in her reading. Not surprisingly, Twin A didn’t report a significant difference.  

   I saw both girls enjoy this process as if it were a game.  I met with them together.  If they did this work on their own, they wouldn’t have to meet with me for at least a few weeks.  

   I worked on the updates and listened to the radio for the rest of the day.

    Around 7 pm, Jean pulled into the driveway with her son-in-law and grandchildren.  She was here to pick up the plastic crate we packed with her two 15 lbs. angels.  It had been sitting in the back of my car where Joseph had put it earlier in the week.  Jean had a bunch of plastic zip ties to seal the lid to the plastic crate.  She asked for some tape and a Sharpie to write her contact information. Then they were off to the airport to deposit Jean for her flight home. 

   As I sat on the lanai and watched The Royal, a British TV Series about a ‘country’ hospital, I got a phone call from Darby. “Look at the comet.”  I saw a smokey vertical streak in the sky.  That was it. I was looking at something that hadn’t been seen from Earth for the last 80,000 years. Too bad Mike wasn’t here.  It would have meant a great deal to him.