Out of Her Mind -- Musings on Education and Life

What a difference 8 months make!  My last post was right after Nadia graduated from preschool.  Now, she is in the 2nd half of kindergarten.  She has learned to read.  She loves school.  She says that she wants to be a teacher because her teachers take such good care of her (they make sure she gets her enzymes each time she eats at school).  She has even taken to assigning herself homework when she doesn't have any (Wonder where she gets this from?)  This week, I tried to get her to go to bed with the promise that we would finish her homework in the morning--but she wasn't having it.  She cried to do her homework! Her energy and personality manage to keep me from hyper-focusing on her illness all of the time and staying freaked out (as I was in my last post), though it still happens.  This winter, she has been plagued with a chronic hacking cough.  I am assured that this is the result of recurring sinus infections.  Like clockwo...

Some time in June.... Nadia graduated yesterday, and I cried--not because of the significance of the moment (it's only pre-school, and I'm not that sappy!), but because I wondered if I would see another graduation for her--if, in 13 years, she'd be alive and part of the graduating class of 2023! [Okay, that year was weird to write.]  Something was way wrong with me yesterday.  I mean, who loses it at a routine visit to the gyno?  Of course, most people don't go to those visits planning to learn that their daughter will never have children, either.  I suppose I should have known that, logically.  I knew that boys with cf are sterile.  By the time a person with cystic fibrosis is of realistic (out of their teens!) child-bearing age, her health is likely to have deteroriated to the point that pregnancy is out of the question--a danger to the mother, if she is physically able to get pregnant at this point (low weight causes a host of reproductive issues)....

Teacher Bobbi In this course, the Psychological Processes of Reading, many of my notions of what the brain does while it reads were solidified. Prior to this course, I had studied several theories of reading, but this course helped me to synthesize those, to understand their historical development, and to see that several reading theories, although partially disproven, still hold value to the researcher and the reading teacher. Furthermore, I began to understand reading comprehension with more depth. As any serious student of reading knows, there are two important reading theories regarding attention and automaticity. LaBerge and Samuels (1994;1974) first posited that reading is like playing a musical instrument or a sport: that you overlearn the lower processes (like reading the music or memorizing the plays) so that the brain will be able to focus on the more difficult aspects of the activity (playing the music or executing the play). In reading, Automaticity Theory explains t...

. "The Development of Verbal Efficiency, Metacognitive Strategies, and Their Interplay" ( Walczyk , 1994) uses Perfetti's (1985) Verbal Efficiency Theory as the lens with which to view the construct of comprehension.  The following is a response to a couple of questions raised by Dr. Omer Ari in regards to this article. 1. On page 182, Walczyk discusses “compensatory mechanisms” and the conditions under which they may be used. What does he mean by “compensatory mechanisms”? Compensatory mechanisms are the comprehension strategies students might use to repair comprehension.  These strategies require that the reader be metacognitive .  Once a breakdown in reading comprehension has been detected, the reader has several courses of action, depending upon where the breakdown occurred.  For example, a student can read slower.  If the information decays in working memory, the reader can re-read the text (or that portion of the text).  The reader ...

Morris & Gaffney's (in press) article, "Building Reading Fluency in a Disabled Middle-School Reader" details the work done with a rising 8th grader at  Appalachian State University's Reading Clinic over the course of a calendar year. Who is Luke? Luke is a middle- schooler , a rising 8th grader, who reads at the rate of a 2nd grader.  He lacks fluency and speed.  Exogenous Factors:  moved from another state in 5th grade Endogenous Factors:   ADD, seizure disorders; both controlled by medications Reading History: at 5th grade, read at late first grade level had difficulty in decoding/read at a slow rate after working int he Wilson Reading program, his decoding had greatly improved by the end of 6th. However, rate remained slow. He currently reads at a 3rd-4th grade level with a significant deficit in reading fluency. Luke's Intervention--Focusing on Fluency Using his interests (Civil War, WW II, Civil rights, & Greek mytholog...

The Constructionist-Integration ( Kintsch , 1988; 2004) Model of Reading comprehension (CI) sounds like it may be a construction crew out building libraries or bookstores, but it is really a model of how working memory constructs meaning by assembling propositions (sentences or meaning units like phrases).  This model is from the constructivist school of thought, which espouses the idea that we create meaning from the world around us rather than discover a meaning that was intended from the beginning.  In other words, a reader brings his or her background knowledge to the text, and in that manner, he or she will have a unique reading experience no matter the book.  If a sentence says "dog," one child might envision a poodle while another envisons a pit bull.  Therefore, each reader interacts with and experiences the text differently. In order to understand this model, it is necessary to understand some key terminology. textbase or microst...

How Does The Brain Work? If I could answer that question, I could probably be cooling my heels on a nice island somewhere, mimosa in hand,  Instead, I am left to read research and theories about how the brain (and reading) operates.  One can dream, though..... For years, researchers delineated memory into two types:  short term and long term.  More recently, after the advent of LaBerge and Samuels Automaticity Theory (1974) and Perfetti's Verbal Efficiency Theory (1988), this construct was re-imagined as working memory --which adds the dimension of processing to the function of storage ( Daneman & Carpenter , 1980).  As they explain, "Working memory is assumed to have processing as well as storage functions; it serves as the site for executing processes and for storing the products of these processes" (p. 450).  Working memory is active rather than passive.   Tanabe , Azumi , Osaka, & Naoyuki (2009) explain that workin...

Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children (1995), by Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley is a qualitative look at the at how parents and children interact during early childhood, as children acquire language and then develop their language skills.  This longitudinal study examined 42 families, 23 of which were middle class and the remainder which were classified as professional (high SES ) or welfare families (lowest SES ), and their verbal interactions beginning when the child was 10 months of age and ending when the child was 3 years old.  The researchers noted that the biggest cause of difference in amount of utterances in an hour was SES status, rather than gender, race, birth order, and so forth.  They observed that in any given hour, the children in professional families heard approximately 2, 153 words per hour in contrast to the children of welfare families, who heard an average of 616 words an hour.  Once this data was ext...

Beck and McKeown's   "Increasing Young Low-Income Children’s Oral Vocabulary Repertoires through Rich and Focused Instruction" (2007) details 2 studies that show the importance of rich and extended vocabulary instruction for students from low socioeconomic status backgrounds. Study 1 Research Question.   In study 1, the research question wa s, "How well do students in kindergarten and first grade learn vocabulary through direct instruction compared to those who are just exposed to the words in text (incidental acquisition)?"  Participants. Participants in this first study were in four kindergarten classes and four first graders from the same small, urban school district.  Although the study began with 119 students, pre -test and post-test data was collected on a total of 98 students (46 in the control condition and 53 in the experimental condition).  Further, the school was one of high poverty, and of those in the study, all were African-America...

The article "Vocabulary: A Critical Component of Comprehension" ( Joshi , 2005) explores the crucial role vocabulary knowledge plays in reading comprehension.  In this article, Joshi laments that we need more research to see how vocabulary affects reading comprehension, but explains that a synthesis of research shows that there is a causal relationship--that those with poor vocabulary knowledge also have poorer reading comprehension skills and vice versa .  Compounding the issue is what is known as the Matthew Effect --the idea that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. In reading, the better comprehenders read more widely, and their vocabulary increases.  Poorer comprehenders avoid reading (or read easier materials) and do not make gains in vocabulary.  Thus, the gulf widens. Joshi discusses ways of teaching vocabulary, though noting that most vocabulary knowledge isn't directly taught.  Rather, it is acquired with each contact with a word, a...

In this chapter from Lenses o n R eading , Tracey and Morrow discuss six of the prominent cognitive processing theories from the 1950s to the 1970s.  It is interesting to see how our understanding of cognitive processes in general, and of reading in particular, have become more sophisticated with time, though there is still much we do not know about what occurs in our brain.  Each of these models make pretty good conjecture based on the research available to the theorists, and each model helped progress our understanding of the reading process.  I particularly like that the authors discuss both the historical significance of these six theories (The Substrata-Factor The ory of Reading, 1953; Information Processing Model, 1968; Gough's Model, 1972;  Automatic Information Processing Model, 1974; Interactive Model, 1977; Rauding Theory, 1977) and the parts of the model that are still relevant to researchers and practitioners today.  For instance, LaBerge &...

○ According to Larson, what should be the unit of processing? Letter or word? LETTER ○ What is at stake with a word shape model of word recognition? UMM --it's crazy--the actual process of reading is not understood and would lead people to focus on unrelated features of the word.  Our instructional time is limited.  Struggling readers need the MOST time to spend reading and they need the highest quality of instruction--teaching word shape is ineffective and muddies the waters.  You will have students who can't read because they didn't learn to decode. ○ Should we teach typical eye-movements (of a reader) to struggling readers? I don't know where I stand on this issue.  My instincts say---maybe with the most disabled readers.  But this seems so instinctual, so tacit.  How do you teach it?  It's a slippery slope issue.  Teaching stuff like eye movement reminds me of having dyslexics focus on strengthening their eyes and their fine and gr...

"The Science of Word Recognition"  is a comprehensive rebuttal of the word shape theory of word recognition, as first posited by James Cattell in 1886.  At the time, this theory, which explains that words are recognized by their shape rather than by individual letters, was based on 4 experimental findings:  1.  the Word Superiority Effect (letters are recognized better in the context of words), 2. the fact that we read lowercase letters at a faster rate than uppercase letters, 3. misspellings are frequently overlooked when the shape of the overall word is not changed by the mistake ( tesf vs. tesc ), and 4. text that is a mix of upper and lowercase letters is difficult to read.  However, these 4 findings have other logical explanations.  For instance, the context provided by the word itself is what allows the reader to remember the letters in a word.  Take, for example, acronyms.  When acronyms are used to study, like KPCOFGS (King Philip Cam...

I Saw Only Thirteen Years My mind swims with thoughts of Neesie You would be, what, 26, these days? A full thirteen years older than when I last saw you. You died and left me, my young playmate& friend— sister. Not twins, but closer. I remember you had gained weight --a good sign— You stole my tips & awaited your period & womanhood. Now I try to imagine your kids & mine— but instead I can only see your freckles below soft blue eyes. B. Faulkner 1:20 p.m. 12-11-09 Valdese, NC   She died 13 years ago today!

You're Not Sick--You're Nadia We walk so that you may dance a wild young rhythm on ballerina feet. We walk so that you may sing lustily, off-key, about princesses & love so that you can ask, "Do I get to go to Hollywood?" so that you can say, "Tell me no, mom, so I can practice crying." We walk so that your crying will remain just practice. Girl, you demand life like you demand food like you command your daddy to rub your feet like you sass me & say, "I know that" & roll your eyes. We're here to roll our eyes at cystic fibrosis, hands on hip, giving it full sass so that you can continue your strange way of calling people humans, your hourly costume changes-- We walk to spread your attitude--like you told Gavin, "I'm not sick! I'm Nadia!" My daytime Cinderella, we walk for you. B. Faulkner 4-26-2010   Come visit our team web page, Team Nadia Denise , for Great Strides.

Nadia before and after diagnosis: always smiling and STILL GROWING! I am not trying to write a sob story. My goal is to NEVER have to do that. My goal is to rewrite my daughter's story, to give her more time for her exposition, time for the rising action that will allow her to learn more about life and herself in the process, time for experiencing life's conflicts (commonly referred to as milestones and experiences). I want the resolution to be a long time coming; I am not interested in penning her epilogue. My dream is that she'll be around to pen mine. I can not change the fact that my daughter was born with cystic fibrosis. Nor would I have chosen not to have her here living her life, as I could have done had I known after conception that she was sick. In many ways, I am SO thankful that her disease was such a shock to me. Had I known prior to her conception that her father and I were both carriers of the cf gene, I would have felt it unethical to have a ...

"Original exploration of the craft alone expresses a poet's individual soul and conscience" (p. 178, from Ginsberg's Journals: Mid-Fifties 1954-1958). I agree, Ginsberg!  I've spent all of my time until recently exploring poetry alone and have stumbled into my "style" without realizing my cosmic influences, or who it was that paved the way for my eccentricities.  However, I feel that because I chose to leave my official English studies after my B.S. that I know nothing of styles, movements, criticisms, all the nuances the literary types pride themselves on (see, here I go, ending sentences with preopositions).  But I have always read like reading was a drug, and I learn well on my own.  The problem is making the time.  I've loved you, A.G., since my college boyfriend allowed that I could have your book of collected poems after the breakup because I loved it more.  And from you--stylistically--I stole the & and your habit of time, date, and pl...