Tuesday, November 26, 2024

 Tuesday, November 26, 2024

   I was overcome with anxiety this morning, contemplating the political situation and its consequences.  I’m not optimistic. My parents were refugees from Nazi Germany. Trump’s emphasis on personal loyalty over everything else is cause for great concern. I don’t even want to share all that I have envisioned. It’s bad enough that I have these thoughts. 

     I shared some of my thoughts with Dean and Nina as I walked with them this morning.  Dean expressed more optimism than I did, and he’s no more a Trump fan than I am.  Talking about it calmed me.  There’s nothing I can do about it.  If this situation winds up as bad as I anticipate, I have no idea how it can be turned around.  I remembered Eleanor Epstein’s advice. Eleanor was a colleague when I taught adults in Brooklyn, N.Y., in my thirties. She must have been in her 70s. One day, I expressed concern about climate change. I was worked up. Eleanor said in her strong Brooklyn accent, which I sadly can’t communicate here, “ Betty, never worry about the future. By the time it arrives, it won’t be what you were worrying about anyway.”  Isn’t this the best advice you ever got? 

    I met with seventh-grade LV from Pacifica, CA, for the second time today. Again, I screwed up the time. I thought her mother asked if we could do the session at 8:45 instead of nine. I texted her when she didn’t show up, asking what was happening. What a ditz!  I caught my mistake, but not before revealing it.  Who wants to work with someone who can’t manage time? 

   I confess that time had never been my strong suit. The worst example of that was when I offered to drive my eighty-something mom to a doctor’s appointment. At the same time, I made arrangements to take my car to the garage for service.  I didn’t realize the conflict until I walked to my mom’s part of the house to collect her for the appointment.  I stopped dead in the middle of the living room with the realization I didn’t have a car. I couldn’t give her a ride. She was pretty pissed with me and called a cab.

     LV signed on at nine a.m. as scheduled.  As I suspected, she understood the value of the seven-step decoding procedure for multi-syllable words.  At the start of the last session, which was our first, she was hostile. I worked on words she could already read. In the last example, I saw the light bulb go on.  I asked her if she could apply what she learned. As I suspected, she got it. She told me she was paying more attention to the syllable structure of words. She picked up on it faster than any other student I ever had.  This isn’t going to take long.   I switched to phonemic awareness of every word in the sentence. 

    While this was an unfamiliar exercise, she was a game student and did reasonably well. Actual phonemic awareness means paying attention to the sounds you actually make. There are many surprises packed into this activity. It can be jarring. Students apply principles they’ve learned in phonics lessons that don’t apply.  The sound of the vowels in the unstressed syllables is not mentioned in most phonics lessons.  Just the sound of the vowels in the stressed syllables.  The variations in pronunciation are only taught in Orton-Gillingham lessons, at least in the Alphabetic Phonics version that I was taught.

    On the other hand, applying the standard application of phonics is usually helpful. While more often than not, you will come up with a mispronunciation of the word, you will come close enough to figure out what the word really is with the help of context clues, using the words in the rest of the sentence.  If the word is not in your vocabulary, you’re sunk.

    LV attends a school of performing arts.  Her strength is singing and dancing.  She, of all people, should know the value of reviewing the basics.     I told her identifying the basic sound units of words and the letters that represent them are the scales of word recognition.  Practicing that on a sentence daily will help her maintain and improve her reading speed.   My original plan was to switch to comprehension after covering the seven-step decoding procedure for multi-syllable words. I will do that in our next session. I’ve already set up the work for it.

    Logan continued with the detailed analysis of the sound/letter relationship of all words in a sentence. He identified the vowel letters and which of the letters made a sound in the word many without a hitch. He also remembered that there will be two syllables in the word if there are two sounds vowels.  I teach there must be a syllable division separating the two vowel sounds.  He divided the word as m/any.  While that is a meaningful way of looking at the word, it didn’t divide it into syllables.  He doesn’t get it, no matter how many times I go over it. I don’t think it has to do with a lack of intelligence; it’s a lack of mental flexibility. He has a concept In mind and has trouble letting go of it.  It is not a willful stubbornness.  I’m not sure what the cause is.

   I took care of a few telephone chores today. I called the church and asked to have a Mass said for Mike on October 27, 2025. I request masses be said for him on his birth and death dates. 

  I called HECO, our local electric company, to check if we got money from them for the energy we sent.  With this new system, we are pouring electricity back into the electric company on off-peak hours when the sun is the brightest. Because we are on a staggered schedule, we pay $.21 between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. We get back $.10 to $.11 out of the $.21 they charge us. The customer service agent didn’t have information on that but told me that the permit hadn’t cleared yet and my solar shouldn’t have been turned on. Well, that was a shock. I called Provision Solar, the installers.  Jaymie told me she knew of the situation. I can’t remember if {ropvsion had to do something or HECO. there was some provision made during the pandemic so solar systems could be turned on before the final approval went through.  That’s good. We’ve been rocking it.