Haikus for Sunday and Monday

Delight

You're here! Three weeks late.
I've been waiting for you.
Green grass everywhere!


Red-winged Blackbird

Red epaulet wings,
Black body on a tree branch,
Strident sound reveals.

Poetry for April

I am committed to writing one poem a day for the month of April. I have been posting on Facebook, but have decided to post here instead. So here are the first five. I thought maybe I wasn't supposed to name them, so that is why the names changed. Anyone know about that? Anyone? Anyone?

1. Sign of Spring

March winds have no bite.
Winter has finally fled.
Green leaves rise with the sun.

2. Fresh

Red, ripe strawberry,
Sweet as a warm summer day
Awakens the mind.

3. Haiku 3

Raw, rainy day.
Wind gusts whip my umbrella
in all directions.

4. Haiku #4

Winter's bite returns.
The air is cold and bitter.
Where is the sunshine?

5. Brains at Work

Teacher and student
bend to the task of writing.
Imagination.
   

A Week with Thomas Merton

If you are an atheist, you may not want to read this. I promised at least one person a few quotes to live by from Thomas Merton. Merton was born the same year as my mother. As a child, Merton lost his mother to cancer at age 6. She had been an interior decorator. He moved to France with his father, who was a water color artist. So his early childhood and early adolescence were spent with artists. His father died of a brain tumor when Merton was 15, and he was sent to private schools by his grandfather. He was kicked out for poor behavior, and started his writing career at Cambridge. He blew his chance at Cambridge with drinking and loose women.  Out of this failure, he chose to convert to Catholicism at the age of 23. After a retreat at Gethsemane (in Kentucky) he chose to join the monastery three years later. Although he entered the monastery to leave the world behind, he grew to believe he was in the monastery for the world. He spoke French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Latin, Greek, Russian, Chinese and Gaelic. Okay, so, here are the quotes:
1. The only real answer to anything is love.
2. Art is the ability to see the inner radiance of things.
3. Viet Nam was an age characterized by destructiveness.
4. When studying Zen, everything is emptiness, everything is compassion.
5. When studying the Spanish mystics, the inner radiance of being.
6. When studying the Shakers, ordinary objects reflect inner beauty.
7. The miracle of mindfulness is that we see what is in front of us.
8. Stop looking, start seeing.
9. Natural contemplation is the intuition of the divine through nature.
10. We find the divine exactly where we are.
11. He saw the camera as a contemplative instrument, to see things as they are, not as he wanted them to be.
12. The way to get a life of prayer is to pray.
13. Agape love is knowing another person without judgement.
14. We are here to be.
15. Be awake to the present moment inside and outside of ourselves.
16. Self exists in the ground of being.
17. Listen to your body.
18. Learn a unified life.
19. Experience what we already possess.
20. The grateful man knows God from experience, not hearsay.
21. To determine your vocation, look for a place where you feel at home.
22. Everything that is authentic and done with integrity is a form of prayer.
23. Spiritual growth is a waking from the dream of separateness. The whole illusion is a dream.
24. Tragic insufficiency of human faith.
25. I intend to become the best Buddhist I can.
26. Truth binds people together.
27. Love is the thread that sews our hearts together.
28. There is love at the heart of things.

Assistive Technology for Reading

 When I first began to think about using Assistive Technology (AT) in the field of reading, I was overwhelmed with the amount of information available. After 22 years of teaching special ed, I gained a lot of skills in the diagnosis of reading difficulties and methods for teaching reading. As a techie, I immediately applied my knowledge to help struggling readers. Sadly, people in the reading field and people in the tech field don’t necessarily collaborate.

Reading is one of the most complex activities a person can do. It involves vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, phonics and phonemic awareness. It is most closely associated with auditory skills (of many varieties), but visual skills (of many varieties) are also factor. Interfering factors besides weak auditory or visual skills can be attention, short-term memory, inability to visualize, and a lack of background knowledge. Reading selection concerns whether the student will read only, highlight only or highlight and read. Whereas reading letters, words, chunks, lines, sentences, paragraphs or a whole screen each pose their own set of difficulties for the struggling reader. Text preferences, such as font, style, size, color, background color, highlight color, affect the reader’s abilities. Reading sentences or chunks can affect comprehension, if the student is still trying to decode each word (sound it out).

There are some tools that can help with very little expense. These are the low-tech reading tools such as colored plastic filters, highlighters, post-it-notes, post-it page tabs, plastic colored page overlays, reading guides and graphic organizers. Color can be an important factor in the ease of reading, although there are not many studies available on this important topic. Tools that are a bit more expensive are tape recorders, audio books, book lights, accessibility features on computers, tablets, and electronic dictionaries,

At the high end, text readers read the material for the student so that they can keep up with the information contained within. Screen readers such as Kurzweil ($1395), Premier ($79.95 to $299.95), WYNN ($99), and Acrobat (free, but will only read .pdf files) can be very expensive. Optical Character Readers (OCR), which take input from a scanner and then read it,  are also on the expensive side. They can translate textbooks into audio for students. Somewhat less expensive is the Don Johnston software

Co:Writer, Read: OutLoud, Start-to-Finish books, and the Solo Literacy Suite. MathPad, Access to Math and Ultimate Reader can change the color of backgrounds, texts and highlighters.

I would be amiss if I were to forget to mention my favorite reading web sites. Tar Heel Readers is a site that has many interesting books. Some are even written by students. Each page has a picture and the text is read to the student.  At Reading A to Z, schools or parents have to purchase access to the resources, but there are many books at each reading level and lots of resources for parents and teachers. Tumblebooks is another commercial site, but it is too expensive for individuals. I also love Goodreads. Teachers can post recommendations for their students or receive recommendations for whatever genre of reading they want.

Finally, there is a web site called Readability that will let you download an add-on button to your browser (Firefox) toolbar that simplifies pages so they are less distracting and simpler in appearance.

There is much, much more, but I will never get this published if I don’t stop at some point.