Monday, January 6, 2025

 Monday, January 6, 2025

    I took half a Seroquel last night, 12.5 mg., considered a very low dose when the maximum is 300.  I looked it up online.  It is an antipsychotic.  The doctor doesn’t think I’m psychotic; this medication is good for mania.  Anyone with performance anxiety experiences mania.  Mania is a requirement for rock and roll performers. Many of them turn to drugs because they have trouble coming down from those highs.  My sleep was good enough. I didn’t want to sleep for 10 hours.  I had a good six hours straight through.  At my age, those are winning numbers.

    It rained last night. Yay!    Yesterday morning, we didn’t have a drop of rain that touched the ground.  It is our dry season, but come on, there are limits. I worried about my babies since I hadn’t had a chance to water my  42 fledgling shrubs that morning.  But went to sleep without a care because of the rain. 

    This morning, I went down to tend to the shrubs, concerned that the chickens had uncovered the roots.  I have to recover the roots daily. I wasn’t expecting to have to water. Ha!  There was only enough rainfall to wet the surface of the soil.  I watered each shrub.

   I met with fourth-grade GV this morning at 9.   I reviewed contractions.  He said his understanding was somewhat better. There was still something missing.  It was because I encouraged him to share his confusion that I found out what it was about.  he didn’t understand why one would leave out the o in is not and substitute an apostrophe.   Yikes!

Did he hear the difference between “is not” and “isn’t.”  yes, he heard it. You need to spell it differently so people know what you’re saying.  Then, when he read the paragraph, we worked on yesterday, he misread isn’t as is not. Interesting. What he didn’t ask was why have the different ways of saying the same thing in the first place. Maybe he will in our next session. I see GV as a bright, thoughtful child. Why does he not see something like the ‘obvious’ difference between is not and isn’t?  I’m sure he’s not the only student with this ‘problem.”  I put the problem in quotes because I’m sure it’s a strength in another context.   

    Then I had the Twins.  I had Twin E first. The sentence presented a lot of spelling challenges.  She spelled during as doring and weight as wate. I consider both of those reasonable efforts; they are phonetically regular.  No, I do not advocate that we return to using invented spelling as a way to teach reading and writing.  I do not do that.  When invented spelling was used, the children used it to write their thoughts.  They didn’t have a correct model to check their work.  In dictation, there is a model of the ‘correct’ spelling.  However, the goal is not for the students to spell the word perfectly the first time.  If getting it as close as possible is the goal, the activity is a game. If the goal is perfection, it becomes work. 

   This may be the underlying problem with the school system: success and failure are binary. You either get it right, or you don’t.  The moment you open the process to trial and error instead of perfection, the kids want ‘to play’ it on their own.  All you have to do is get out of their way. I introduced Phonetics Discovery System Phase I to a group of third graders. By the second day, they were vying to lead the process. Did they do it correctly? Oh, God, no.  But I had learned from other students I taught that was not necessarily relevant.  As long as their level of frustration didn’t exceed their level of tolerance, they kept right at it.  With the development of PDS III, they use dictation to have the correct answer available when they become frustrated.  

    They had that with Phase I, too. They worked with words they knew how to spell. The game was figuring out which letters represented the individual sounds.