Awsum, how's the storm treating you? I hope it's not too bad. I think they are worried because of Hurricane Sandy doing so much damage. Maybe this won't be so bad, but no one wants to take chances and be unprepared.
Tutoring: Today, the new girl read something about Halloween that I chose since that holiday is coming up, and the kids are all excited about it. The passage mentioned saying, "Trick or treat," and the girl said, "No, it's trickle treat!" I argued with her a while about how she heard it wrong, but she refused to be convinced. She is a stubborn little thing. I think I'll ask her friend, the girl I've been tutoring a while, to set her straight. Maybe the new girl will believe her friend. She sure likes to argue with me!
On the plus side, I think she has a photographic memory, or close to it. Last lesson, I had her read a short paragraph, then covered it with my hand and asked her to tell me what it was about. She repeated it word-for-word. Sure, it was only 3 or 4 sentences long, but she had never seen it before, read it once, then recited it back to me. I was amazed and told her so, and mentioned that she might have a photographic memory. I said that it meant you could memorize things very easily. But I asked her if she really understood what the passage said. I asked her questions and had her explain it in her own words, and she did understand it. I think sometimes people with photographic memories can repeat things without understanding them, so I wanted to be sure. I do notice that she tends to read silently at a glance, a kind of speed reading, and often gets detail words wrong or anticipates what the next word will be and says it w/o reading the actual next word. I'm trying to get her to slow down and see the actual words. Recently, there was one where the actual word and the one she imagined meant different things, and I pointed out to her that she can get confused by not reading the actual word. She's definitely got a different way of thinking, which I find interesting. I want her to improve in accuracy without killing that other talent for thinking outside the box. It's treading a fine line. I hope I can do it w/o killing the way she thinks.
The girl who I've been tutoring a while started Chapt. 4 of the Mowgli stories, but we spent a lot of time chatting, so we only read the first page. What we chatted about was her homework reading about bats and how they use echolocation. She asked if a person could do that. If she closed her eyes, could she sense where she was by echoes? I said I doubted that she was practiced enough to really do it, but I told her a story about a blind woman I knew when I was a kid. She was a friend of my parents. I was fascinated by her, because she was the only blind person I knew, and I was curious about it. We were walking together down a city street one day, and she said to me, "I know we're getting close to the street, so you have to tell me when we get to the curb so I know to step down." I was amazed. "How do you know we're getting close to a street?" I asked. She said that as we walked and talked, she could hear the echoes off the buildings surrounding us, but when we got to the cross street, the echoes stopped. I was amazed and tried to hear the echoes off the buildings, but I couldn't. I learned that people who have lost a sense, like sight, develop their other senses more to make up for it, and they perceive things the rest of us don't notice. The girl was fascinated by this story. I wonder if she'll do what I did, which is walk around with my eyes closed and try to sense things by echolocation. I bumped into a lot of furniture in my house before I gave it up. And then I told her about a book I read about a blind person who learned to feel coins and tell what they were. A quarter is bigger, so that's easy, but a dime and a penny are pretty much the same size. But a dime has a rough edge, and a penny doesn't, and the person in the book could feel the coins and tell. I took out a dime and penny from my wallet and had the girl close her eyes and feel the difference. She did it. Then she asked how you could feel the difference between bills, and I said I doubted you could, so she tried a one and a five and got them wrong. Then we went back to our lessons, but I think that conversation wasn't exactly wasted time. But then the little boy came in with a toy. It was a compass, the kind you draw circles with, not the kind you find directions from. Neither kid knew what it was for, so I showed them how it worked, how you put a pencil in it and made a really nice circle with it. This compass wasn't a very good one. The point that marks the center was blunt plastic, and it strayed easily, so the kids, when they tried it, didn't get nice even circles, but they got the idea. They were thrilled to know its name and what it was for.
So back to the lesson, and that's why we didn't get much of Chapt. 4 read.
I started the older boy on learning to use Google Maps or MapQuest to find out how to get from here to there. I like MapQuest better these days, though I always used to like Google Maps. I told him this, and he tried both and agreed. I don't know why they "improved" Google Maps and now it can't do what it used to. There's no telling what's in people's minds sometimes.
So the boy was interested in the routes and times it'd take to get from his school to the restaurant, and he looked at "walking," "driving," and "biking." He asked if they had one for running, and I said they didn't, but if he could run the whole way, it might be something like the biking one. It's a mile, and I asked him if he could run a mile without stopping, and he thought he couldn't. Also, he has to get to his violin lesson in 20 minutes, and the biking option said 18 minutes. He said he'd need time to catch his breath after running a mile, so he doubted he could make his lesson on time. Maybe this isn't making deliveries for the restaurant, but calculating the time it takes to get from here to there is a start, and this was something he chose, so he was very interested in how it worked and finding the answers.
Next time, I looked up 5 Ithaca addresses in the phone book at random and he will have to find out how to get from the new restaurant location to them and write down the directions. With my help, of course.
Did I mention it? The restaurant is moving a few blocks away to a new location! It's been a big thing for the kids' parents. They are renting the place they have now, but bought property to open their restaurant, since the property they're renting may be torn down in a year or so for new buildings. And they have had complaints about the landlord not fixing things and the old restaurant equipment, so the kids' mom ordered all new stoves and such, and they are opening at their new location next week! It's been a long haul and an expense, but I think they will be happier having control over their own property. They have gone through so much getting the place ready. It's not just the fixing up of the building, but things like the EPA wanting soil analysis because it used to be a car dealership. (Thousands of dollars for that.) Then they had some professionals come paint parking lines in the parking areas outside, plus a handicapped spot with the proper symbol in blue. (Over a thousand for that.) And at the last moment, the building inspector said they couldn't open unless their handicapped spot also had a sign! So Thursday, instead of picking his son up from school as usual, the father was off, miles away, buying a sign, which he had to call around to even find out where he could buy one. I got there Thurs. and waited almost an hour for the father to get back with the keys to the house so we could all go there from the restaurant and I could tutor the kids. And the boy never was picked up after school. They had me headed out to get him a half hour late when he showed up because a teacher had driven him home. In the backseat of my car, his mother-in-law was yelling in her cell phone in Chinese at the kids' dad, probably for not getting his son from school. Or maybe for taking the keys with him. I don't know. So we waited in a loading zone with 15-minute parking and the dad finally arrived with the keys.
So you can see that getting the new place ready has been an adventure for the parents, and I just sampled a small part of the frenzy on Thurs. I think the parents have been coping like this for months.