During Bikram, I worked on changing the weight distribution on my left foot. I relaxed part of the outer edge, allowing my weight to sink deeper. After Bikram, I stopped at the transfer station to drop off another large bag of paper waste. Good Lord, that man saved everything he could find a place for and threw nothing away. Every once in awhile, I come across a goodie. I found the paperwork my dad saved when he was securing an affidavit for his brother to get a visa to immigrate to America from Nazi Germany in 1937.
When I got home, I put the rest of the cut hibiscus branches into the black bags. Then I started cutting down the oldest of the three shrubs that both Farm and Garden and Margo from Sun Rise Nursery told me I should give up on. I found some additional infected leaves. I guess I will go out every day and check if any new ones come up and pick them off. I should spray the ground around the shrubs as well as the bushes. I will do that tomorrow.
Once that chore was done, I showered and went to school to work with the child, one of the teachers asked me to work with. I didn’t have much time today because I had a doctor’s appointment at 1:15 pm.
The teacher introduced me to the class and told them I was coming in to help this one child, but I would be able to help others. School started on Monday. The teacher had told the girl about me, and she asked the teacher every day when I was coming. The teacher also told me that she was shy and shut down. Her first-grade teacher had bullied her because of her reading problems. With a kinder 2ndgrade teacher, she made a year’s progress.
She brought a low first-grade book. She read 2 or three sentences before I could identify a problem. She skipped over the word our. I asked her if she skipped it because she didn’t know the word or because she didn’t see it. She told me she hadn’t seen it. I took this as an indication of a visual processing problem. I asked her if the letters moved around for her. Yes. I taught her how to release the movement, so it no longer interfered with her reading, the spin release. I also gave her an exercise to do: naming the letters in a word either before or after reading it. I think she wasn’t looking at the letters in the words because she couldn’t trust her eyes to take in all the details in a reliable way. When spin release reached full speed, she didn’t want to release it. She had that Cheshire-cat-grin on her face, otherwise known as the shit-eating grin. It is neurologically impossible to stop that grin. What does it mean? Somehow, we know we’re up to no good. How does it promote our survival to be so self-revealing? Beats me. I did some work with her on her feelings about the spinning, both positive and negative. At the end of the 20-minute session, she reported she saw a difference. I told her she would have to do the spin release each time she saw the letters move. Eventually, the spinning would stop.
I also discussed the vowel letters, their role in decoding single and multi-syllable words, and how to divide multi-syllable words by my process, and encouraged her use of context clues.
________ ___________ ____________
Musings:
Brooks writes a lot about self-sacrifice and self-restraint as hallmarks of the truly great. I have seen people who measure their goodness by their degree of self-sacrifice rather than the impact on the people they serve.
I remember in 1968 when young people like myself were revving up to go the Chicago Democratic Convention to protest. I thought these are people looking for a cause to die for. The opposite is being willing to die for a cause. They are not the same thing. Having a cause we are eager to make sacrifices for, throw ourselves into, allow ourselves to be consumed by, can be fulfilling. It can also be just plain distracting. It gives us an excuse for not looking at ourselves and the impact of our actions, both positive and negative. A cause can be just as much an addiction as any drug. I will say that serving a cause can be better and less overall destructive than drug addiction, but not necessarily. You have a partner or a parent who makes the cause of more important than you or their children, sacrificing them for the cause along with yourself.
On the subject of self-sacrifice: every decision we make involves self-sacrifice. We are always dealing with conflicting desires, ambitions, objectives. We can’t have it all at all times. Two-year-olds have temper tantrums because they can’t be two places at the same time. We all want the impossible. We all have to make choices every day of our lives. And each choice involves a sacrifice of something we want.
Sacrifice is a great advertisement, but it’s overrated. I prefer people who understand that whatever they do, they do for selfish reasons, including giving their life for another. We are in the center of our world. The problem comes in when we think we should, therefore, also be the center of everyone else’s. No, we are not the center of their world; they are the center of their world. I love people who deny this fundamental truth about the human condition and consider themselves truly giving people. I don’t do well with those kinds of people, or did you guess that already?
What separates the selfish from the unselfish is not who comes first, but how closely someone else comes second. How important the well-being of others is to us. If the only person who counts is number one, ow!
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