I was up at 6 am. I walked Elsa, did my oil rinse, made my Juice Plus smoothies for two days, washed the dishes, packed clothes so I could change after Bikram, and put my briefcase in the car. I had plans to go to school directly from Bikram.
JJ is gone for the summer, and we have a new teacher, Heather. When I saw her, I recognized her. I didn’t like the way she spoke. I remember being uncomfortable with her presentation style. I like it much better now. She is a good teacher; she knows as much about the body and the practice as JJ does. She made a suggestion and an observation. I disagreed with both. I have to tell her not to give up on me. My first reaction may be to say, “No, that’s not right.” But I will always think about what she said, and I always value her feedback. Her observation that I had too much of my weight on my left leg still doesn’t feel right. Not that I’m not going way over, it’s just that I’m doing it to realign the leg. But then she said that my right knee looked much smaller. I told her that I thought it might be because I have strengthened my left leg, making it a bit bigger. But, I think she’s right; it is smaller. I think the reason is that I have just recently learned to tighten my thigh, my gluts, and my abdominal muscles, in that order. Once I learned that I started pushing the back of my heel/ ankle back as I walked to propel myself forward. This action tightens my knee and thigh without causing a hyperextension. Must tell her tomorrow
After I rinsed off and changed, I stopped off at Island Naturals to buy more pumpkin seeds and dried cranberries to add to my salad. Then I drove up to the school to work with that one student who is still far behind.
When I got to school, the whole 3rd grade was on their way to lunch. Because I remained in savasana for half an hour after class, I arrived at school later than I had planned. Oh, well. And the class I had been working with had ‘caf’ duty, cafeteria duty, which kept them occupied for the rest of the day. Instead, I worked with two students from another 3rd-grade class after they came back from lunch.
While waiting for the kids to come back from lunch, I called Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans; John and I promised them the list of Mike’s books for them to choose from. I got the head librarian on the phone. I assured him we hadn’t forgotten him, but I had only cataloged 1700 books so far, and that is only 2/3 to ½ of the books. He giggled.
When the students came back from lunch, I had a chance to work with two students. One was a boy who I had worked with a lot. He had made considerable progress, but still got stuck on the longer words. I have to keep modeling how to deal with words that present as confusing. I emphasize identifying the vowels, first and foremost. Most syllables (yes, there are a few exceptions) contain a vowel sound; the rule of one syllable equals one vowel sound is pretty reliable. I have the students find those vowel letters in words. Then they have to decide how to divide the words. There has to be a line between each of the vowel sounds. I think competent readers do this automatically. We divide words in our minds and blend them back together again without thinking about it. He needed to remember to apply this rule to words consciously that don’t look familiar immediately.
The other student had/has more of a psychological problem. He is afraid of everything. He doesn’t want to do math because it frightens him. He claims he is afraid because students tell scary stories. There was not much I could do that involved his cooperation. I just used EFT tapping. Then he had to leave for recess. I continued the tapping at home. I have no idea if what I did made any difference to this child. I have no idea if his problem is generated by life circumstances or a severe neurological issue that needs more invasive treatments.
On the way home, I thought to stop by at local bodega and pick up 2 bars of Hersey’s milk chocolate with whole almonds, but I found the tutoring so satisfying that I didn’t need to. Besides, when I got home, I had my chocolate smoothie to look forward to.
At home, I vacuumed the lanai and the kitchen, applied several kettles of boiling water for weeds, wrote on the blog, and played FreeCell. Then I took a shower with soap (the shower at the yoga studio is a rinse-only.) and did MELT for my feet and hands. I did two laundry loads: Shivani’s towels and Bikram stuff for Yvette, Scott, and me. The first load on the line-dried before the washing cycle for the second load was finished. It’s that time of year. The sun is so hot that we get instant drying unless we get a torrential downpour.
My tutoring student’s aunt finally listened to her read and was very impressed. We both think that her initial evaluation couldn’t have been accurate. They said she was on the first-grade six-month level. She may have read slowly and missed a lot of sight words, but she had a lot of skills in place and just needed practice. She is a bright girl who learns quickly and will put in the effort. She declares she loves reading now and is working on The Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, which are considered on a fifth-grade level. Since she improved in reading and is working on her own, I am concentrating on math now. She still has problems with subtraction with regrouping when there are zeros in the top number.
I worked with her on pattern recognition. I wrote out the 2 times table and the 3 times table, had her identify all the odd numbers in the factors and the answers, and asking her to identify a pattern. The pattern I was looking for was that the answers to the two times table were all even, and the answer to the three times table alternated between odd and even. Then to see if she could figure out why that happened so that it can help her anticipate if an answer to a multiplication problem is going to be odd or even. While I had something in mind, I’m always open to other observations. She knew which numbers were odd and even, but couldn’t apply it as rapidly as I thought she would.
While I walked Elsa on our before dinner walk, I missed Mike. I was thinking of his loving ways. All I had to say was, “Okay,” and he knew what to do: get up and give me a hug and a kiss. He sometimes initiated it himself. As I walked, I thought of how I felt when he did hug and kiss me. That made me feel better. If I can evoke the terrible way my mom made me feel when she scourged me with her words, I can evoke the wonderful feelings Mike made me feel. I talk to Mike frequently. He’s worried about my food and my sadness, and my neglect of the garden. He’s pushing me to call the gardener and get the weeds taken care of. I told him to get a life. Well, maybe, get a death.
For dinner, I had a large salad, to which I added more feta cheese. I don’t like the Asian mix; I have to remember not to buy it again. I had some leftover soup, 3 slices of butter multigrain baguette, limeade, tapioca pudding, and my pills.
While cataloging the books, I came across a CS Lewis book, “ A Grief Observed.” He was in much greater agony than I am. Besides losing his mom when he was nine years old, he met his wife late in life and only had her for a short period. She brought him out of his shell and allowed him to be touched by another, her. He talked about how she would penetrate his bubble with her words and make him reconsider his thinking. Sounds like she was Lewis’s ‘worthy opponent.’
He talked of how he couldn’t picture her face. I experienced this when I lost my father at 15. I concluded at the time that it was just too painful. A young colleague in Ohio lost her husband when they were both in their 30s. She was wondering if something was wrong with her because she couldn’t picture her husband’s face. I assured her it was normal and not an indication of her not caring about him. I also find I can’t imagine Mike’s face now. I can feel him hovering but not see him in my mind’s eye currently alive. I can’t see them clearly either. I know that it’s their face, but I can’t see the details, even their expressions. I realize it isn’t that I can’t picture his face; I just can’t imagine it the way I saw it when he was in front of me, and I could take in the details of his facial structure and his expressions, a face I was so familiar with.
After dinner and cataloging the books, I walked Elsa again before going to bed, washed my face, brushed my teeth, and went to bed. Good night, Elsa, Goodnight, Mike.
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