All those Allos

I have a client that I see about once every three weeks for just a half hour or so. It's amazing how much capacity can be built in such a small amount of time when what's being studied is real.

Galen is homeschooled, 13 or 14, and really, really bright. His sweet Mama confessed to me that she sometimes worries that she's not smart enough to continue homeschooling him, because, she says, he is so much smarter than she is. I know the feeling; my own son has outpaced me in many ways pretty much since he was toddling, and continues to do so.

According to his Mama, Galen never has to be prompted or cajoled to come study with me when it's time. "We are enjoying the information you share immensely," she writes. "This is a class I don’t have to wake him up for - he is always awake and ready when I go to his room."

Once, after using some color coding to clarify sentence structure and demonstrate the differences between simple, compound, and complex sentences, Galen reported, "Wow! That was actually really helpful. The colors make it really easy to see." Mama emphasized that "it's really helpful" is high praise from Galen.

I'm always prepared with material for study, but we rarely get to it, as Galen usually comes with a question or two for us to explore. Sometimes, we do a little clean up of some prescriptive misinformation he's heard elsewhere that didn't make sense for him. Galen has come with questions about commas whose pursuit has revealed the internal structures of sentences and the difference between a phrase and a clause. His questions about subordination revealed the relationship of grammatical form to grammatical function and restriction in noun modifiers. We have studied examples of zeroed structures including both pronouns and phonemes. We have studied both FANBOYS and WABBITS, IYKYK.

All this, we have done in just four 30-minute Zoom meetings. Yesterday was our fifth. Galen and his Mama showed up right on time, as they always do. I asked him if he had a question. Now, most of Galen's questions have been about syntax, not spelling, which is not a particular weakness for him. But yesterday, he brought me the following question:

"In the word transcribe, you have a prefix <trans> and a base <scribe>. Why aren't there two <s>s?"

In response, I made a large picture frame with my hands and arms. "I'm going to start with the really big picture first," I said. I then made my frame smaller and said, "Then I will move to a slightly smaller picture." Galen nodded. I made a small picture frame with my pictures, just a couple inches square. "Finally," I said, "I will zero in on your question."

Here's the ground we covered: