Mike's death; Betty's life...

Friday, November 6, 2026

Wednesday, April 23, 2025

I called Raymond James today to see if Social Security had deposited two checks in my account for a second month. That would be a problem. I planned to open a dedicated account for those checks to protect myself from fraud charges. If there had been a second check, I would have called the Social Security Department today to see what was happening and how to deal with it. I looked for the letters I got telling me about both checks. I couldn't find them. I thought I had put them in a special folder; so much for my good plans. Given it's only one, I'll wait for SS to contact me if it's an error on their part.

I found another book I'm enjoying. I like detective mysteries, stories with a professional as the protagonist; I don't like mysteries when the protagonist is either the victim or the perpetrator.

I had four students today. Two were satisfying. The Twins were not. Both were either tired or disgruntled. They were not at their best. Maybe that's not fair. I used the same passage I used with fourth-grade MH, on which she did so poorly. The first sentence was, "Few early Americans had rugs on their floors." This was the first sentence in a fourth-grade passage. When I asked what an 'early American" might be, she didn't have a clue. So far, I have asked this of two students. They didn't know what an early Hawaiian was either. Is this an antiquated expression? Ok, next question. If only a few early Americans had rugs on their floors, would you be more or less likely to find rugs on the floor if you walked into a friend's house? Not a clue. Could I have answered these questions when I was in fourth grade? I could have handled the 'few' questions with ease, but my dad ran dinner like it was a Paris salon- profound intellectual topics were the subject of dinner table conversation. Is ten too early to know about probability? I should check the Hawaii Board of Education curriculum guide.

I checked. Statistics and probability are first introduced in the fifth grade. Since all my students are struggling with basic math, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of whole numbers, asking them to think in terms of probability is unreasonable.

I look at everything in terms of probability. I set an unfair standard for my students. I won't use that passage again. If I do, I must remember to teach the concepts before asking questions.

One of the men who wrote the Barnell Loft series was my sister-in-law's fifth-grade teacher in Baldwin, New York. According to my sister-in-law, the town was a refuge for middle-class Jews fleeing their associations with the Communist Party during the McCarthy era. Mike's family was one of those. Education is of utmost importance in traditional Jewish culture.

The other two sessions were both satisfying. The first was fifth-grade GV. We continued working on multiplying two-digit by one-digit numbers. He needed a lot of coaching.

Thursday, April 24, 2025

I spent the morning gardening while I listened to a mystery on Audible.

It was supposed to have Ulu Wini today. When I parked at the center, I saw the tables hadn't been set up. That meant the session with the children had been canceled. I checked my text. Sure enough. Shauntel had sent me a message at 1:38 that it was food pantry day. She would only be doing homework with the kids.

My trip wasn't a waste. I planned to stop at Costco on my way home anyway. The prepared salads, Sweet Kale, and Apple Pecan, which I love, weren't on the shelves the last two times I was there. They didn't have either of the salads again. I asked one of the employees who usually works in the produce department. He said they weren't expected in. He had no idea why.

When I got home, I found an article listing contaminated food items. Lettuce was on the list. That was a probable explanation.

It's never a surprise when items are missing from the shelves of Hawaiian shops. We're dependent on shipments coming in by boat; it takes up to three weeks for boats to come from the mainland. While mundane items are usually available, that's not always the case. White vinegar wasn't available at Costco for several weeks. I have no idea how that happened.

I called ZN's mom for feedback. I wanted to know if she saw a difference in his reading after only five sessions. He reported his reading was better, and it appeared that way to me, but was the difference because he was making an effort where he hadn't before, or had his skill level improved?

His mom said there was a huge difference. ZN remembered and decoded more words. Wow! She also said that while he didn't enjoy the work, he knew he had to continue if he was going to improve. "Wow!' again. I wouldn't have credited him with that order of maturity. He had a long-term goal.

He responded to my brand of instruction. I started off by teaching him phonemic awareness. Few teachers know what that is. Knowing good phonemic awareness is key to being a good reader; many programs have rebranded phonics instruction as phonemic awareness. While some students learn phonemic awareness from phonics instruction, it's up to them to make that leap. Most students don't do that. Fifteen minutes of actual phonemic awareness can make a difference for many children. ZN was one of those children.

Because I used actual phonemic awareness, I caught that he couldn't accurately produce some of the sounds. He confused /f/ and /v/. The articulation, the mouth formation, is the same for both phonemes, but there is a difference in the voicing. Many teachers with zero training in this regard have no idea what to do. He had a problem with another sound. In that case, the problem was with the articulation. I told him to watch my mouth. He quickly picked up.

The second thing I taught him within the first three sessions was cross-body blending. GV, who is in the same class as ZN, told me he could see him constantly doing the cross-body blending. ZN has proven to be the type of kid who will use whatever you teach him. I've never had a student like him.

The third thing I taught him was how to apply his spelling skills to reading. The woman who taught me the Orton-Gillingham phonics method said she could never help students who were better at spelling than reading. It's rare to find a student like that. I figured out how to help him, but I had an advantage Aylet Cox did not. I have a background in cognition and neuroscience. I knew about lateral transfer. I figured out how to apply his spelling skills to his reading.

When I started working with him, the school report said he was reading at a 2nd-grade level. From what I saw, he was on a low first-grade level, perhaps just kindergarten. He couldn't read the Sassy the Cat passage on his own.

Sassy the Cat

Th-e-re w-a-s a b-l-a-ck c-a-t. Th-e c-a-t w-a- s S-a-s/s-y th-e c-a-t.

S-a-s/s-y w-a-s b-l-a-ck a-n-d v-e/r-y f-a-t. H-e s-a-t a-n-d s-a-t o-n

h-i-s m-a-t. A b-l-a-ck r-a-t w-e-n-t b-y S-a-s/s-y th-e c-a-t.

I-t w-e-n-t i-n a h-a-t. S-a-s/s-y th-e c-a-t w-e-n-t t-o th-e h-a-t.

H-e a-te th-e b-l-a-ck r-a-t. H-i-s l-a-p g-o-t v-e/r-y f-a-t. H-i-s

t-ai-l w-e-n-t t-a-p, t-a-p, t-a-p.

His mother said he practices on his own. This child is driven.

GV had a problem similar to LG's: He blocked new information. Where LG had bad panic attacks that rendered him 'brain dead,' GV just didn't get it. He could hear what I had to say, but his mind couldn't incorporate the new information. I spoke extensively about his difficulty letting in new information.

New information always creates a moment of disorientation. Poor learners hate that feeling, which they call confusion, and struggle to reestablish order. Good students say," Yay. I'm going to learn something new." I doubt the best 'good learners' feel that way about everything. I'm a good learner in certain areas and a poor one in others. Trying to learn a foreign language, even one I'm familiar with, like my mother tongue, German, is irritating. I could develop the brain pathways needed to learn another language. However, I have no reason to subject myself to an unpleasant experience. Given that I would be starting now, close to the end of my life, rather than having discovered the joy of language learning at the age of three, I doubt I could ever become good at it. Maybe if I approach the process through my love of neuroscience, I can discover what I have to do to modify my brain. Nah. It's not my thing.

GV monitored the time of our sessions. He announced when our half-hour was up. He did that today and wrote, "I am sad." I didn't know what he was sad about. Was he sad because he had this problem that prevented him from being a good learner? No. He was sad because our session was up, and I was saying things that had meaning for him. I gave him additional time.

I asked him if he liked doing jigsaw puzzles. Yes. He had told me his dad did 5,000-piece puzzles. I told him learning was like that. The question was, how did the new piece fit into the puzzle? Then I realized that wasn't quite accurate.

When doing a jigsaw puzzle, the outer boundaries remained the same. You only had to figure out how a new piece fit in. While learning, new information could change the outer shape. Finding a superordinate category that incorporates the individual elements would expand the boundaries. GV has a very narrow, rigid idea of stability. He told me that everything was easy until letters and numbers were introduced. He remembers feeling happy before that moment. After that, everything became difficult. The goal is to help him feel safe with disorientation, to help him learn and believe he can survive the experience.

When I told him that blocking new information is a fear response, he said everyone in his school is the same way. GV is in a special class for students considered cognitively within the normal range but performing way below grade level. He told a story about an event when a girl in his class ran out of the room screaming at the teacher because she didn't understand what she was saying. I wondered if the teacher saw it as inappropriate behavior that required discipline. Sounded like a fear response to me.

At the end of the day, I had a fifth-grade student named ZN, who was in the same class as GV. He doesn't have a tablet; we have to use his phone for our Zoom meeting. When we connected, he spent a good two to three minutes walking around and waving the phone in the air. Once he settled down, he did well.

I asked ZN if he was seeing any improvement in his reading. He told me several times he thought his reading was better. His behavior was so erratic that it was hard for me to gauge the truth. It seemed better. However, I didn't know if his original performance was a sign of his discomfort with the unfamiliar or a reflection of his reading level. He told me he read at a second-grade level. The reader I encountered was struggling at a Kindergarten level. He didn't recognize the word there because he had a poor memory for sight words, couldn't produce the sounds of some phonemes, and had no idea how to blend the sounds he did know. I addressed the last two within the first two lessons. The third was his problem with remembering words.

I discovered he could spell better than he could read. I taught him to use his strength in spelling to help him read. Today, I had him read the fourth story in the Carpenter series. He had to work at it, but he managed to do it on his own. I had to call his mom and check if she had seen any improvement.

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

It was a Ulu Wini day. I started comprehension with second-grade JM. Her word recognition skills are way above grade level; her comprehension is way below, primarily because she lacks background information and vocabulary. She could have gotten this example correctly. She didn't know not to pick out a detail when asked to identify the main idea.

Next, I had second grade, AR. When I checked my notes on her, indicating she had problems with memory. I pulled out the first 50 words on the Fry Sight Word list. She did very well with many of them but had no memory of others on the same list. She misread the word be. That baffled me. I showed her the pattern: me, he, she, we, etc. Did she look for patterns? She made a face that said, "Why should I do that?" The number of kids who can't or don't look for patterns blows my mind. Since she could easily identify most of the words, memory didn't seem to be the problem. I asked her if she practiced learning the words. She said she didn't have a list. She asked for two copies to use with her grandparents.

First-grade AM wanted to write a book. She had already written several stories with me. Today, she wanted to write about cars. She rambled on a bit but stuck to the subject, cars.

I worked with fifth-grade KC. Shauntel told me about her. She's special ed. I asked her what she wanted to work on. She said, reading. She said she couldn't read. I used the Carpenter material, the first story, Sassy the Cat. She didn't know the word there. A fifth grader who didn't know the word' there' had to be very low-functioning. I sounded out each word for her to identify as I pointed to the word. She had problems blending some of the sounds to get the correct word. She confused /v/ and /f/. I showed her cross-body blending and helped her form sounds by watching my mouth. She did pretty well. Then, I had her read the passage on her own. She got most of the words. She may have good short-term memory for a story. I asked her if this is how she usually reads. She said yes. I have no way of knowing what the truth is. She did say she had trouble reading the long words, like there.

Third-grade AL asked for help with double-digit multiplication. This is the same problem fourth-grade LG needed help with. With him, I worked on multiplying two digits by one digit; he had a devil of a time following the pattern. With AN, I showed her how to multiply up to six digits by one, then a second, and then a third, using the exact numbers 3242102 x 2, 3242102 x 22, and 3242102 x 222. She easily saw the pattern. She solved the problem with the three-digit multiplier on her own.

I had three people cancel sessions this week. Fifth-grade ZN's mother was one of them for our Monday session. I was disappointed because I was anxious to see if my theory on approaching his reading problem using his excellent spelling strength would work.

His mom texted me at 5:26, asking if we were on for today. We were scheduled for 5:15. Damn! I get easily confused about time. It's always been a challenge for me. Between age and retirement, it's a much bigger struggle. Retirement creates problems because you have no structure around time. You get disoriented. The Facebook post, "For retired people, there are six Saturdays, and then there is Sunday," is accurate. It makes my problem worse.

I managed to get on with ZN. He spent most of his time wandering and then dropped out of the Zoom after twenty minutes. I got some good work done with him. I used the passage we had worked on the last time, which I had dictated to him. He spelled the words and then read the passage, spelling each word before he read it. He read most of the words by spelling them out first. He only had problems with multi-syllable words. He can divide spoken words into syllables using sound, but he can't divide written words into syllables using sight.

My friend Jean told me she ran into a friend she hadn't seen in a while. The friend looked spectacularly better than she had the last time they saw each other. The woman's skin, hair, and nails looked better, and she said the woman's bone density exam showed improvement. I ordered what the woman took. It's in powder form. I'll never do that. I need some convenient pills.

The product, Algae Cal, claims to provide Collagen. I have been taking Youtheory collagen supplements on Yvette's advice for several years. The recommended dosage is six pills a day. I've been taking four. My hair does look fantastic. It hasn't thinned. My nails have been good until recently. The nail on my left index finger has a thin spot. As it grows, I can see the light shining through the place. My bones? I had severe osteoporosis by the time I was fifty. I have lost less bone mass since menopause than I did before it. I have always been physically active and never had any bad habits that would have destroyed my bones and teeth. Genetics? One doctor said it could have happened in utero. I had a grandfather who had bad teeth. I could have inherited his poor ability to absorb minerals.

I went to see a specialist about osteoporosis at fifty. He was an arrogant jerk. I asked him where I could get medical information about osteoporosis. He recommended books you can buy at airports. I said I wanted medical-level information. He said something to the effect that I was not capable of understanding a medical text. I tore him a new one. He said the local hospital had a medical library.I believed I would know the answer to my question when I came across it. I trusted my intuition, but I didn't have medical-grade knowledge.

I spent several hours reading incredibly boring texts. I found what I thought was the answer. Collagen is the building block of bone. The calcium was the filler, vitally important, but it wasn't the only factor. There wasn't anything I could do with the information at the time, but I was right. I'm sure that smug doctor is dead and gone now. I don't like smug arrogance. Can you tell?

I spent most of the day swallowed by an audiobook by Michael Leese, "Going Underground." I'm learning that endlessly listening to audiobooks can make me feel comforted or terrible. Some of it is the book's quality; the other aspect is how much I get done in the day, other than playing FreeCell. The Leese's book was satisfying.

Monday, November 2, 2026

Monday, April 21, 2025

I mowed the large grassy area today. The seed stalks were already two feet tall.

At 1:30 pm, I had a doctor’s appointment for my Botox treatment. I see Dr. Farringer every six months on Kaiser’s dime. It’s prescribed because my right brow droops so low it obscures my vision. The shots are painful. The doctor told me how well I did. I thought he was kidding. While I didn’t groan, I did writhe. He recommended I get the surgical solution, a brow lift. Kaiser would cover it. The ophthalmologist offered it as a solution. I chose Botox because the brow lift would eliminate whatever forehead I had. Dr. Farringer assured me I’d have the same amount of forehead after the surgery, but that’s because he’d make the incision above my hairline. What would happen to the hair in the area of the incision?

I mentioned the surgical solution to Dean and Nina. They scoffed. The doctor would make a tidy profit from my surgery.

Fifth-grade ZN’s mother texted me early in the day to tell me he wouldn’t make it tonight. He was invited to a birthday party for his cousin.

I did have fifth-grade GV and fourth-grade LG. GV wanted to prepare for the state exam, which would be administered the following week. I used questions about division from IXL fourth-grade math, “Complete the division equation.” He didn’t have a clue. The questions were about finding the missing number in the equation. He had a poor idea of how to solve any of the problems on his own. I showed him the triangle, with the product on the top angle and the two products of divisor and dividend and the bottom two angles. I hope he would remember to refer to it when doing such problems.

I hope he would remember to refer to it when doing such problems. i showed him the triangle to depict the multiplication/division fact family.

He said, “Ah! That makes sense.” But we’ll have to see if he’d remember it in our next session on Wednesday.

With LG, I continued working on multiplying a two-digit number by a one-digit number. I asked if he did better in school after our last session when he locked himself in place and breathed while I modeled the procedure. He said yes, but he did only slightly better as I modeled it.

LG asked if he could work on his multiplication facts. I’m sure learning them took a chunk out of his soul. He had made progress. When I started modeling multiplying a 2-digit by a one-digit number, he managed to control his body and not wriggle or get up and walk away, but his mind went blank.

I created problems with the 9 times table because that’s what he had been happiest using to demonstrate his knowledge at the beginning of the session.

12 13 14 15

X9 X9 X9 X9

I drew the lines showing the order of the process each time. Then I gave him 21. He multiplied 9 x2 first. He thought he always had to multiply the number one first instead of the number in the one's place.

There is nothing wrong with this child’s brain. He was a nine-year-old kid who took an old computer, got his father to order the parts online, and built a new one on his own. I thought he learned it from his. Nope, he learned it from YouTube videos. The poor kid wants to be an engineer but can’t learn anything abstract. He has full-blown panic attacks when he has to deal with the abstract. He thinks something’s wrong with his brain. There isn’t. His blank mind is a typical result of panic.

Sunday, April 20, 2025

Easter Sunday. I got up early, as I needed to leave earlier than usual. Good thing I did. Ali'i Street fronts the church. It's a two-lane road with a 15 mph speed limit and stop signs. The traffic is always heavy. I spotted a man from the parking lot ministry as I approached the church driveway. He guided the traffic in and out of the church, stopping the road traffic when needed. Everyone was respectful of his directions. I found plenty of parking spots.

I finally have a satisfying name for the source of my agony: loneliness. In the past, being in the company of others helped, but it doesn't seem to do me as much good anymore.

A college roommate identified me as lonely in my freshman year of college. I don't know what she saw in me, but it's true. This feeling isn't new. I remember it from when I was four. I always felt lonely. I have no idea where I got my expectations. I can't be the only human who didn't get the needed 'connection' with their parents. But I have a concept of connectedness that defines my sense of well-being. I think many, if not most, mothers bond with their infant children. My mother was not one of those mothers. She focused on her responsibilities. She did that well.

Mike and I went through a period in our marriage when we lost that connection. We didn't fight; we weren't rude or uncaring. We didn't have that connection. We both considered leaving the marriage quietly within our minds. Then, suddenly, it broke. We spoke about it when it happened. We both had considered leaving and concluded we had nowhere else we wanted to go, and the other person was a good person. We would make ourselves comfortable within the remaining emotional space. As I said, it broke. Our remaining years were joyful.

It brings us back to the question of what a loving or even satisfying connection with another human being is. Love has different faces. Christianity and Buddhism speak of compassion. Fr. Boyle of Homeboy Industries helps LA gang members rejoin society, speaking of not offering others compassion but Kinship. Compassion's near enemy is pity, which is too often taken for compassion.

How does Kinship differ from compassion? We feel compassion for someone who suffers in ways we don't or aren't at that moment. They are the other. Kinship acknowledges the shared suffering of all human beings. It acknowledges that we could all suffer what someone else suffers. This Kinship is attained through cognitive and emotional empathy.

But all meaningful connections have a similar feeling of bonding. What creates that feeling? It's something neurological. Our brains synchronize; we're in harmony.

The shortcut to that harmony is mob action, whether it's a military, a crazed mob, a rally, a rock concert, or a crisis. The unrestrained emotional output of those events unites us. There are more subtle bonding experiences: classical music concerts, lectures, and unexpectedly, running into a single human being who shares our beliefs, religious, political, cultural, or philosophical. We even know how close the person is to our point of view by how we harmonize with them. The harmony can be blocked by caution. Sex is undoubtedly a way to harmonize. If we're lucky, we meet one or two people with whom we harmonize enough to make us feel connected at all times. I had that with Mike. I had 45 years of it. As I said above, it wasn't perfect. When people tell their partner they don't feel loved, I suspect it's the absence of that feeling they are referring to.

Having a common cultural practice or fixed roles can provide a sense of connection and belonging. Actors achieve commonality by fulfilling their roles in scripts. They all have a part to play. A strong family structure can ensure that. We had 'assigned seats' at the dinner table in my family home. It provided me with a strong sense of security that might be lacking through other means. That provided a type of bonding.

Sometimes, we bond with people by following a destructive script involving endless fights. Relationships can't be judged from the outside so easily. People find each other according to their needs. We look for the 'negatives' in people as well as the 'positives.' We prefer not to be consciously aware of it, but there's plenty of research backing up that theory. The question is not where the relationship starts but where it ends. Are the two people good for each other? Do they become better people through the relationship?

I observed one couple and developed a theory of complementary neuroses. We inevitably seek out someone who complements us. How we respond is not inevitable. I found myself attracted to the same kind of man over and over. He would be just like my mom, defensive. I let Mike into my life because I recognized my poor choices. I set out to date any man I didn't think would do me bodily harm and do precisely what I wanted to do. I set a limit on how often we could date and how often he could call me. Mike was the third date. I still would have rejected him had he not decided he was going to marry me before our first date and remained persistent.

In today's sermon, Fr. Lio spoke about exiting the parking lot, pleading for patience, kindness, and respect for the parking ministry's directions. I left shortly after Mass. There were no donuts and coffee today. They wanted people out as soon as possible.

I headed to Target, only to be surprised by an empty parking lot. Do all Target stores close on the major holidays? I have no idea.

I did a bit of gardening, loading a bucket of garden waste to take to Darby. I planned to carry the dozen eggs Dean and Nina left with me for her in the bucket to her house. Before I could, Darby was at my door to pick them up. I walked her back to her house carrying the bucket while she carried the eggs. Darby showed me around her property. I saw all the places she stuck orchids, tied to a post or tree, or stuck between some rocks. You have to do less when planting orchids rather than more.

I had one student, fourth-grade MH. She chose to work on the dictation/spelling exercise. It was a passage we'd started a while ago that proved confusing. We reviewed the sentences we had already covered. "Few early Americans used rugs on their floors. Instead, they were painted colorful designs." I asked, if few Americans used rugs on their floors what do you think their floors looked like? She said they had rugs.

I drew a line: "none a few a lot all." First, I just wrote 'all.' What's the opposite of all? She got none easily. Where would I place a few' on the line? First, she said closer to all than none. She corrected herself.

If only a few early Americans had rugs, would you be more likely to find a rug in that house or not? She said you'd be more likely to find a rug. It turned into a math lesson. I find these kids have serious problems with pattern recognition and probability. I know that when they're methodically walked through a problem, they can learn how to do it themselves. I have to try this passage for comprehension with Twin A. I have to try this passage with all my students.

Saturday, April 19, 2025

I had no students today. I thought I would have the Twins. When I tried to connect, Mama K texted me to say they were down south at her uncle's 80th birthday party. She planned for the girls to meet with me. She brought the iPad in anticipation, but no Internet connection was available.

I went out to do some gardening and worked on updates intermittently. Mostly, I slept.

I've been contemplating a definition of love, a loving or even satisfying connection with another human being. Love has different faces. Christianity and Buddhism speak of compassion. Fr. Boyle of Homeboy Industries, which helps LA gang members join or rejoin society, speaks of not offering compassion but kinship.

How does kinship differ from compassion? We feel compassion for someone who suffers in ways we don't. They are the other. Kinship acknowledges the shared suffering of all human beings. It believes that we could all suffer what someone else suffers. This kinship is attained through cognitive and emotional empathy.

But all meaningful connections have a similar feeling of bonding. What creates that feeling? It's something neurological. Our brains synchronize; we're in harmony.

I heard a TED Talk on the subject. The speaker told the audience that while their brains were all on different frequencies before the talk started, the moment the speech began, their brains reflected a similar pattern. (This was based on research in similar situations.) So, a shared activity produces synchronization. There are short-term and long-term synchronizations.

The shortcut to that harmony is some form of mob action, whether a military action, a crazed mob, a rally, a rock concert, or a crisis. The unrestrained emotional response to a singular event unites us. There are more subtle bonding experiences, such as classical music concerts, lectures, or running into a single person who shares our religious, political, cultural, or philosophical beliefs. When traveling, we can bond with someone just because they come from the same country. We even know how close the person is to our point of view by how we harmonize with them. The harmony can be blocked by caution. Sex is undoubtedly a way to harmonize. If we're lucky, we meet one or two people with whom we harmonize well enough to feel safe and connected all the time. I had that with Mike. I had 45 years of it. As I said above, it wasn't perfect. When people tell their partner they don't feel loved, I suspect they are referring to that neurological synchronization.

Having a common cultural practice or fixed roles can provide a sense of connection and belonging. Actors achieve commonality by fulfilling their roles in scripts. They all have a part to play. A strong family structure can ensure that. We had 'assigned seats' at the dinner table in my family home. I feel it provided me with a strong sense of security that might be lacking through other means. That provided a type of bonding.

Sometimes, we bond with people by following a script that looks destructive, is destructive, and involves endless fights. Relationships can't be judged from the outside so easily. People find each other according to their needs. We look for the 'negatives' in people as well as the 'positives.' We prefer not to be consciously aware of it, but there's plenty of research backing up that theory. The question is not where the relationship starts but where it ends. Are the two people good for each other? Do they become better people through the relationship?

I observed one couple and developed a theory of complementary neurosis. We inevitably seek out someone like that. How we respond is not. I found myself attracted to the same kind of man over and over. He would be just like my mom, defensive. I let Mike into my life because I recognized my poor choices. I set out to date any man I didn't think would do me bodily harm and did what I wanted to do. I set a limit on how often we could date and how often he could call me. Mike was the third date. I still would have rejected him had he not decided to marry me before our first date and been persistent.

My theory has holes in it. Love has something to do with safety, not just for protection against others but also being a safe place to be. I felt bonded with my mother throughout my childhood. When I told her I didn't want to talk to her for a while because I had always been afraid of her, I was sad about losing my bond with her. My mom was very committed to her children. She took her responsibility seriously. As I learned later in life, she loved being a mother. That came as a shock. How can someone be constantly angry at her children and be happy to be a mom? But I had glimpses of her love for me. That was enough to keep me hanging on? The question here is, did I do it because I wanted her to love me or because I loved her? People often confuse the desire to be loved by someone with loving them.

Harlow's monkeys clung to the wire mothers with the soft cloth cover rather than the bare-wire ones with the milk. We settle for what we can get. Is that love?

My neurological synchronization argument might not be it, either. Can't people synchronize in mutual hatred? Maybe neurological synchronization isn't a good, simple answer. Love has to be a synchronization of a specific sort. Does it involve particular parts of the brain or specific frequencies? I know it when I feel it. However, I have sometimes felt that warm, comfortable presence with someone who wound up disliking me intensely. I have more questions than I have answers.

she had a trip to Costco planned. We haven’t seen each other in person for years. Twin E was with her. I got to give her a hug.

I didn’t have a single tutoring session today, and I was good with that. It’s spring break. Fourth-grade LG always goes away for school breaks to grandparents. It gives his parents a break from childcare. Mama K and Twin E were in Kona and not available. Fifth-grade GV had a playdate, and his mom asked if I could switch the session to tomorrow. Sure. I got gardening done. The plumbagos were getting out of control. I must ensure they don’t expand into my neighbor’s yard. As Darby says, we don’t plant in Hawaii; we just cut back.

Friday, April 18, 2025

I met with the Twins at 8 am. It was Good Friday, and they had the day off. I started with Twin A. I told her outright that if she wanted to work with me less, she had to begin decoding the longer words instead of guessing, using only the first letters of the words, and even ignoring the context. We worked on comprehension. She read two passages on the same topic but from different perspectives and had to determine the main idea. She knew the vocabulary. She was mentally 'lazy,' as many of my students were. If it didn't pop into her head immediately, she wasn't interested in giving it a moment to figure it out. Could it be she doesn't know how to do that? I should consider that and not assume hostility. It works better when I take a sympathetic point of view of the student's motivation.
   Twin E chose to work on the dictation and spelling exercise, where I dictate phrases, clauses, or sentences. She had to remember the words and spell them out to me. She still struggled at a 3rd-grade level. The disparity between the girls is a concern. Twin A tests on a fifth-grade level in reading now, while Twin E is a good two years behind.
Twin E experienced a trauma that Twin A didn't. She fell out of a two-story window when she was crawling. The doctors gave her a clean bill of health physically, but how did the fall and everyone's reaction affect her?
   Elsa had a 1:30 vet appointment to get a vaccine shot and an ear culture, the latter at my request. I wanted the test to provide concrete information about the effectiveness of the treatment I had been using. It had been a month since her last test. I requested the results from the test taken a month ago so I could compare them. Was the yeast infection better, worse, or the same? It was better.
   Elsa is prone to ear infections. The vet says her ears react to the same allergens that caused her skin lesions. She has had many rounds of treatment. The vet always said to return in two weeks to check her ears. I never did before this last treatment. Her ears looked clear. Why did I have to have the vet check them? I don't know why I went back for the checkup after the last round.
The vet entered the room and declared, "Of course, she still has an ear infection!" It's a complicated problem to deal with. I told her I found a way to stop her skin outbreaks. The vet snarled, "That's temporary!" Whatever the vets had prescribed wasn't even that. Her lesions got worse. She didn't say so, but I believe she wanted me to put her on medication. I had her on medication at one point; it did no good.
She told me about one poor dog with intractable ear infections. They fixed the problem by sewing up his ears, preventing environmental allergens from entering them.
   That last bit gave me an idea. Elsa's skin problem had been solved by bathing her once a week and leaving a heavy coat of conditioner on. With her skin coated, the allergens couldn't affect her. I could do the same for her ears. Every morning, I coated her ear flaps and outer ears with Intrasound gel, known in the family as "Makes No Claims." Also, every morning, I injected 3 mL of a half-and-half solution of apple cider vinegar and Epiotic, an ear-cleansing solution for pets, and every night, a solution of Epiotic and Intrasound powder. The results were rewarding. Where she had a +1 rating in both ears a month ago, there was no or negligible infection in her left ear. She still had a +1 in her right. That was the worst ear all along. I felt safe in assuming the infection was less. Yay! I found a non-toxic solution to both her skin and ear problems.
    I asked the receptionist for a document proving Elsa had received her vaccine and headed down to Petco. I was halfway to town already. Elsa needed a grooming. I could take care of it immediately.
   The groomer couldn't take her today but could tomorrow. I handed her the vaccine documentation. She looked at it and said, "I couldn't have groomed her today anyway. You're not supposed to do it immediately after receiving a vaccination. You needed to leave time in case the dog had a negative reaction. Also, you needed to wait for the pinprick from the infection to seal before bathing her." I had an appointment the next day at 9:30. Elsa and I headed home.
I only had one student for the day, fifth-grade GV. We continued working on math. He grabbed a piece of paper. He wanted to take notes so he could tell his mom what we had done when she asked. We covered a great deal in half an hour. I didn't take notes. However, I see how logical thinking patterns are taught through math for the first time. There are other ways of teaching them. My dad taught us syllogistic and dialectic reasoning over dinner.

Thursday, April 17, 2025

I woke up this morning in my too-often-usual agitated state. My nightmare is people who insist they are the only ones who know everything. I had a situation where I asked someone for something I wanted, stating my reason for wanting it. They finally gave me something that addressed my request, because they realized what my ‘real’ concern was. They said no to my original request because they deemed my reason ‘irrational’ and said yes when they came up with a ‘rational ‘ reason for my request. How’s that for gaslighting? I don’t care who the person is who’s asking, from my point of view, the decision should only be based on “I can do it” or” I want to do it” versus “I can’t do it/ I don’t want to do it.” That’s what it all boils down to.

I can hear you arguing, there’s more involved. Yes and no. There’s certainly more involved if someone threatens me. Someone holds a gun to my head demanding something from me, money or sex, I don’t want to cooperate, but will because I don’t want to be shot. If an addicted family member pleads with me to give money for drugs, do I say yes or no? There’s what I want to do and what I can do. If I have the money, should I give it? That’s the ‘can’ aspect. Do I want to give them money, knowing they will go out to buy drugs? I guess that many people in this position are torn. Our heads and our hearts do battle with each other. Judgment in this situation is appropriate. Judgment is appropriate when someone is doing something harmful to themselves or others. Addicts self-harm and often harm others. But what’s the right call? It’s not that easy. Whatever we do, don’t justify it. We do it because we want to.

I learned not to judge the reasonableness of others’ actions in my sophomore year in college. I attended a talk; I think the presenter was a minister. He told the story of a college professor in an Asian Indian College. One year, he had a student yell out in the middle of class. Naturally, he ordered him to leave. The student did the same thing two more times. The school had a rule that missing three classes three times was grounds for expulsion. The professor marveled at the student’s irrational behavior, concluding the student was mentally ill.

Many years later, he stayed in a hotel in Switzerland. When he went to pay his bill, he was told it had been covered by the manager. He asked to speak to the man. It was the student he had thrown out of his class many years ago. The student had behaved that way not because he was mentally unbalanced but because he didn’t want to go to college. His father had forced him to go. The man wanted to go to the family hotel business. With the help of this professor, he got his way. The minister's message was, never assume someone else’s behavior is irrational just because it doesn’t make sense to you. I’ve carried that message with me for the rest of my life.

What does being irrational even mean? For most of us, it means behaving in ways we don’t understand. There’s also the definition of being guided by strong emotions. A mother fiercely defending her child from a dog attack is irrational, meaning she is strongly guided by emotions. Is there something ‘irrational’ about that behavior in a bad way? My guess is the answer is a universal no. We’re back to what irrational means to us: it doesn’t make sense to me.

If we have to forego the wonderful defense of rationality versus irrationality, how do we set our boundaries? We’re back to “I can” / “I want to,” or “I can’t”/ I don’t want to,” clearly demarking our boundaries without involving the larger world of abstraction.

I had a session with Shelly, my therapist/life coach, today. Very interesting. In the past, I had many therapists who were antagonistic toward me, considering me a total mess. Now, I have two I have to convince I need help in ways they don’t consider a problem. The things that upset me sound reasonable to them. Knowing that I’m an empath, someone who can read the minds and feelings of others, they think of me as better than people who only want to know their own thoughts. I’m with Ben Franklin: “Everything in moderation.” There’s no one way that’s better than the other.

I consider myself overly reactive. At eighteen, I saw that I shared the tendency with my mother and swore I would never have children and subject them to what I had been subjected to. I’ve spent the rest of my life trying not to be that person. As I recovered over the years, I would marvel at how something that had triggered me in the past now triggered only a minimal or no response. I don’t mean I didn’t ‘act out.” I mean, I had no internal response. That’s what I wanted to work for. Living life like a burn victim, sensitive to every touch, as my mother lived, was not for me. I tried to change not only for my own sake, but also because I thought my mother’s behavior was immoral. She had no regard for her impact on others.

I wound up arguing with both Rob and Shelly this week about my reactivity. Rob argued it wasn’t pathological. I agreed, but it was dysfunctional. Shelly argued that I was that way because I was an empath, someone who could feel what others felt. I argued that my responses were infantile. Wow! That rang a bell.

I have described others as infantile in their responses. I have family members whom I see that way, my mother for one, and two others that come to mind. If they don’t get their way, they find it intolerable.

The thought I had that made a difference was that if the reaction is infantile, the trauma happened in infancy. I know that was true for my mom. That brought about a significant change in my strategy. When I respond to a trigger in my adult state, it’s usually verbal. When I consider my experience from an infantile perspective, the view is different. An infant lies there helplessly, utterly dependent on the care of others. If that care isn’t cautious of the infant's nervous system, it can be damaging. I was my mother’s first. All first-time mothers in our culture approach motherhood with apprehension. With the second, they’re good to go. They’ve been there, done it, and no one died. My mother approached all tasks with alarm even when my sister and I were adolescents. I had to think what she was like when I was a newborn. Besides that, she never held either me or my sister the way you expect a mother to hold her child. She never allowed herself to take pleasure in bonding. She thought there was something wrong with that. Go figure!

Vipassana, a form of Buddhist meditation, teaches us not to think about our problems or emotions, not to categorize anything, but to maintain our focus on our physical sensations in every part of our body. We’re instructed to focus on a small section of our foot until we feel a change in the sensation, then methodically move from one small spot to the next over our whole body, watching for changes in sensation.

I had been feeling vibrating sensations within my body for about a month. I assumed I was becoming highly sensitive. It was an annoying sensation. There wasn’t an emotion attached to it. I wasn’t upset; I just marveled at the feeling. I chose to focus on the sensation in relation to my infant state, vibrating with my fear and my mother’s fears. It made a difference. Let’s see what the long-term impact will be. Hopefully, it will be good.

I never strived to be one of those folks who appeared on a Maury Povich show with people who talked calmly about abusive situations. I know those folks were reactive, but in a different way from me. There used to be only two recognized responses to fear: fight and flight. A third was added to the list: freeze, staying with the F pattern. (In the 1980s, when I audited a neuroscience class at Princeton University, there were the Four F’s on basic human responses: fight, flight, feed, and sex. No one is talking about feed and sex anymore. The focus is all on fear responses.) The folks on the Povich show were reactive, but it manifested in different ways. Several of my students suffer from the freeze response when new material is introduced. Their brains freeze, and they can’t comprehend what is being said.

Fourth-grade LG is one of them. I considered it tremendous progress when he didn’t go into freeze response but into a flight response. Instead of curling up and shutting down, he would get up and walk around. Then he progressed to the point where he could identify his fear.

We had a breakthrough today. We reviewed addition and subtraction with 6-digit numbers with regrouping. No problem. How did he feel about talking about multiplication? He could handle talking about the multiplication facts, but not multiplying a 2-digit number by a 1-digit number.

I told him he didn’t have to do anything but watch. He couldn’t sit still. He was on the move. He found another seat in a spinning chair. I led him through the visualization to release some of the fear. That did something until I went back to modeling the multiplication problem. He shifted in the chair. I saw him doing something with his hand. What was he doing? Drawing. He said it helped calm him. I said that it would be good if it helped him stay calm while learning, but it doesn’t.

Then I told him to grip the arms of the chair and not move, and to breathe. He compulsively drew. I would tell him to stop, but he grabbed for the pencil again. Then, he threw the pen across the room out of temptation. That was very brave of him.

I told him we all had to deal with fear, fear of failure, fear of rejection, oh so many fears. I’m sure I’d told him this was something all humans had to deal with, not just him. I’m sure I told him that before, but he heard it differently this time. I also told him that every time he moved, driven by fear, he was telling his body that he had something to be afraid of. He had to resist moving.

This isn’t some weird strategy for dealing with fear that I made up; the Buddha is the one behind this. This is what Vipassana meditation is about.

LG did it. He gripped and didn’t move. I asked if I could put a line under the multiplication problem. Yes. Could I multiply the first number in the problem? Yes. Could I multiply the second number in the problem? Yes. He looked calm. He was ready for this exercise. I could never have done this with him even a few months ago. I hoped today’s exercise would have some long-lasting benefits. We’ll see.

Wednesday, April 16, 2025

I woke up early last night and only dozed intermittently for the rest of the night. My spirits were raised. I have no idea why. I can only be grateful that I wasn't caught in grief. I hadn't even enjoyed writing during this period. That's pretty bad. I love putting thoughts into words.

Many years ago, in the 1980s, I had a twelve-year-old student named Matthew. One day, I gave him a ride to the shopping center to meet his mother. He asked, 'Do you like to talk?" I said, "Yes." He said, "I love to talk." After a brief silence, I said, "I love to think." He followed with, "Yeah. Think about talking." We then shared how people often told us to shut up. That was at least forty years ago. I wonder what became of Matthew.

There was another incident with him. His mom had come to pick him up. We chatted for a minute. Matthew asked me a personal question. His mom told him he was rude. I said I asked personal questions. She said, "But you're sensitive.' I assured her I hadn't been at twelve. My sensitivity was learned through experience and failure to be sensitive. My guess is Matthew remembers those moments as much as I do.

As I lay in bed before rising, I had some thoughts. Yvette showed me her rash. Holy cow! She was covered with redness and bumps from her ribs down to her hips. I just got a quick glimpse. As I lay in bed, I remembered it was only on the left side of her body, from the front midline to the back. That could be shingles. I was anxious to speak to her. When I got hold of her, she told me she had thought of it. The rash wasn't as painful as shingles usually are. I had shingles twice: the first time, I was twelve, and the second time, I was sixty. In the first bout, it hurt when I scratched it. That's how my parents figured out it wasn't just any rash. Other than that, there was no pain either time. Shingles is infamous for its pain because when it is painful, it is very painful.

Yvette said there was no pain, not even when she gave in to the temptation to scratch. There were other counterindications. I suggested she get a shingles vaccination as soon as possible. I never had any residual effects from the outbreaks, but I understand they can be life-altering.

Mama K texted me first thing in the morning to let me know the girls would be busy today and couldn't meet with me. She is much better at communicating and supporting my work with the girls than she used to be. Recently, I commented that she hadn't supported it as much at first because she held out no hope for the Twins. Since Twin A is reading on grade level and doing reasonably well in math, she's changed her tune.

I had an appointment with fifth-grade GV at 1:30. I was available at that hour because the Twins had canceled. We continued working on math. He aced the addition of fractions with mixed denominators. He got an answer of 1 and 3/15 but didn't understand he had to reduce the fraction to its lowest terms. I planned to review that in our next session.

I asked if he wanted to work on multiplication of fractions. He said no, he wanted to work on his multiplication facts. He didn't know how to multiply 6 x 9=. I told him to find the nearest multiplication fact he knew and use it to add and subtract from there. I gave him 6 x 10=. He didn't have a clue. I had to show him the pattern. Whenever I showed him another pattern, he would say, "Cool!" However, he didn't look for patterns on his own. I would have to teach him to do it.

I drew a number line and wrote out the 6 times table. He said he used that idea when finding the lowest common denominator, but not to solve multiplication problems without fractions. I can see why he has a low mark for his complex thinking skills.

I signed on at 4:20 for my session with LG. I had forgotten his mom said we had to do it earlier because there was an event at the school at 5 pm. I still had one appointment with him the next day..

I finally had fifth-grade ZN at the end of the day. I told him he had a fantastic memory for spelling, but not when it came to reading words. I thought of a way he could transfer his good spelling skills to reading. I had him look at each word of the first 50 words on the Fry Sight word list, then, using his index finger, 'write/spell' the word on a textured surface. He aced every one of the first 25 and got 23 out of the second 25. Then, I had him read and 'spell' every word in the passage he had spelled in our last session. Again, he read every word accurately. I may be on to something, or it may just be a fluke. We'll see.

While the Orton-Gillingham instructor focused on phonics, I had a background in cognition and neuroscience, which was not readily available at that time. Educators focused on presenting information without considering students' cognitive and emotional needs.

I started watching A Remarkable Place to Die on Netflix. I'm enjoying the production, but it's worthwhile watching for the views. It takes place somewhere in Australia.

Because GV's teacher said nothing other than she had done some work with him before I started working with him, it left me wondering what she thought of his improvement. Did she think I had any impact, or did she believe it was all her work? Believe it or not, education is a very competitive field. We're rarely sure of our impact on our students. We can be sure we put together a good lesson, but we cannot know how it impacted our students. Did she think the school had done it all, that she had done it all, and his family was wasting their time and money on me? Her silence left me feeling uncomfortable.

I commented about the schools not allowing volunteers to help the children. The school has bought into the Success for All program, which insists the students should not be exposed to any other method. GV's teacher agreed it was a ridiculous proposition. While the program is a good one, no one approach will always address the needs of all the children. One has to wonder why a company or a school district would adopt such an extreme stance.

I worked with Shelly today. I worked myself into a state of agitation again. Damn! We need to deal with the human condition of inner rage when we don't get what we want. It comes out one way or another. We have to learn to live with it. I help others face it. It's such an unpleasant emotion. I love being loving, kinship-love a la Father Boyle of the Homeboys Industries instead of the compassionate form of love. Compassion often separates us from others. It says I'm okay, but you're not. Kinship acknowledges we're all in the same boat.

I pulled up an Audible mystery that captivated me for the whole day. It's well written and well read: Tim Sullivan's The Patient. That was my day.

I ran into Fifth grade GV's homeroom teacher this morning. I hadn't seen her for about a year. I've been walking later, and she had stopped running in my neighborhood regularly. First, she caught me up on the developments in her personal life. She had been in the process of leaving her husband, the father of her children, last year. They had been in couples counseling forever, and nothing had changed. She had filed for divorce and started dating again. She fell in love. She said she never thought she could feel that way about someone. They got married shortly after her divorce was finalized. She had moved to the other side of Kaiminani, and she and her new husband were looking for another place to live.

She told me she was fifth-grade GV's homeroom teacher. I would love to have had feedback from her, but she felt she was required to respect his privacy; she could face charges if she didn't. I didn't feel quite as confined. I don't talk about my clients publicly, except on the updates where I don't use their names. Writing about them serves two purposes. It helps me think through their issues and how to resolve them. Second, I believe I have worthwhile insights into teaching, and it's a way to put my ideas out there.

I shared that GV had made significant improvement in his word recognition and fluency skills. He still got stuck on multi-syllable words, primarily because he couldn't tolerate not understanding the meaninglessness of the individual syllables. They usually have none.

In phonics training, some programs have students work on nonsense syllables. The Whole Language folks find that a waste of time or worse. However, that's what readers encounter in multi-syllable words and nonsense syllables. GV has a low tolerance for things that don't make immediate sense. It's perhaps the biggest obstacle to his learning. You need to have a tolerance for not knowing to be a good learner and producer. Having a high tolerance for failure is an essential key to success. His teacher only commented that his low tolerance for uncertainty also impacts his social relationships.

GV had made substantial improvements in spelling, but he couldn't sustain it when writing. The neurological load when composing, writing what he composes (versus dictating), and spelling is too much. I realize teachers have marveled about students doing well on spelling tests but not when they write. It's now clear to me why that happens. I teach spelling by dictating whole paragraphs. They have the opportunity to practice writing the little words as well as the big ones. Spelling tests these days include dictated sentences, but only in the context of a test. Testing is not a good way to teach. It only identifies what the student has trouble with. I have never seen a teacher teach students how to study spelling. It's as if everyone should know what to do. I learned my study skills from my dad. If parents don't know more than their children do, the kids sink. This may explain the heavy correlation between Socioeconomic status (SES) and student performance.

I'm working on comprehension with GV now, too. He dismisses information as incorrect when he disagrees with it and, therefore, gets the wrong answer. He doesn't know the difference between comprehension and agreement. Many of the kids I work with have this problem, and I have to revisit it repeatedly.

In his writing, I find his sentences awkward. The method I use, having the students dictate their stories to me, significantly impacts their language development because they hear me modeling how to express their ideas. I started using this method without considering the consequences other than creating a well-written story based on the student's ideas. I was as surprised as everyone else about the impact on their verbal expression skills, both oral and written. I have recently incorporated using Grammarly with them to correct their work (and my typing) for clarity. Grammarly is an impersonal evaluator. Using it on my updates has improved the quality of my writing. When using it with students, they can choose whether or not to use Grammarly's suggestion. I can chime in if I think their manner of expression is unclear. I rarely do. What I do with many students is write their stories myself, using their sketchy input. That's where I have to start with some kids. Then, slowly, they start giving me whole sentences.

I pulled up an Audible mystery that captivated me for the whole day. It's well-written and well read: Tim Sullivan's The Patient. That was my day.