Tuesday, October 15, 2019

I'm still on the floor for Bikram.  I am learning so much in this position. The more I know, the more I learn. It's thrilling.

When I got home, I researched acoustical materials. I found a company that has panels with an R factor of 13 that can be installed between the joists. It is closed-cell construction. I don't know if it will silence every sound, but it should be a lot better than it is now. Now, it is laminated panels over pile wood subflooring, empty space, and drywall. The space between them acts as a sound amplifier. I wouldn't be happy to deal with that problem.

I went out and worked on the plumbago. You won't believe the gall of this plant. After all the work I did to cut it back, it is growing toward the fence again. No consideration.  Elijah had done some pruning. I cleared the clipped branches and sprayed some Clorox on the ground to keep the 2-foot pathway open between the fence and the bush so it doesn't invade my neighbor's property again. 

I showered, dressed, and went to school. I haven't been in school since September 14, a month. The teachers reported that they had seen some progress with the kids I worked with.  I spent a lot of time with D. He is either confused or not fessing up. He told me about the work he is doing at home. I doubt it. The teacher told me he deals with family problems: a sick grandmother and news that the father he was hoping to reunite with was dead. (We're talking about a 3rd-grade boy.)  I know what it means to be so anxious that you can't do anything that requires you to focus. That is how I feel now.  Free Cell, and sometimes the blog is all I'm up for. Working on the book and reading are out in this state of mind. Any doubt that my ADD as a child was not caused by anxiety is over and done with.  My mind was racing the way it did when I was a child, and I was constantly afraid. 

I asked D if he was doing the exercise I told him to do at home.  He said yes. I asked him to describe what he did.  He said he worked on Hooked on Phonics. That's all well and good, but it is not what I told him to do.  I told him to name all the letters in sequence in a continuous text to improve his visual perception and automatic naming skills. After I spoke to the teacher, I realized if that's what I want him to do, I will have to have him do it when he works with me.  The assumption that this is an easy exercise to do on his own is false.  He isn't doing it on his own.  

K was a delight.  I asked D to send her out.  I thought," He's going to forget to tell her; then she's going to delay it as long as possible and then come out with 'tude all over her face. Nope. She was out there quickly. She had a book that might be considered a high K or low Grade 1 book, but she sat down and read it through.  She did such a good job; I asked her if she had read it before. No. Then she told me that there was a disgusting picture in this book. "How do you know if you haven't read it before?" "Because my friend showed me the picture." I didn't interrupt her once.  This is a girl who needs a horse (kid) whisperer.   She has to be reeled in slowly and gently.  If she is going to take this initiative, I will happily figure out how to follow her lead.  If she needs control, why not?

I had a few minutes to work with B at the end of the hour. He is also showing some improvement but continues to need help.  His teacher asked me if I would take on another student.  I told her no. I'm just not up for too much.  I work with these kids for my sake as well as theirs.  I have to husband my psychological energy. I told B's teacher to play my audio file on bandcamp.com.  I told her the results with the 7-year-old with delayed language skills: he spoke more. His vocabulary had increased, and he could better understand what was said to him after six sessions. Also, his 15-year-old brother, who heard the file because he shared a room with the boy, was reading faster and understanding what his teachers said better.

The teacher is finally impressed; so am I.  You would think that just doing something 5 minutes a day would be worth trying. But I understand. We are all used to doing certain things. Introducing something new takes effort. I'm the same way.  Can you call it being lazy? I guess so.  We are used to the answers coming right from our unconscious minds; it's automatic. Something new we have to use our conscious minds; that literally requires much more energy. (For those interested, the audio file is available for free at bandcamp.com; search for Elizabeth David Ross. The first track is the story read in a normal voice.  The rest of the tracks are the story being read one phoneme at a time. ) 

I have to climb stairs when walking on the school property to get to the 3rd-grade classrooms. Wow! My left leg is much stronger.  I am doing something right.

When I got home, I worked in the library.  I found another book. There is a series call and Introduction to . . . .  This one was on St. Thomas Aquinas. It's a small paperback with 119 pages, sort of a Cliff's Notes version of his life and work; Mike has two shelves devoted to the dude.  The abbreviated version sounds about right.  I can read that and consider myself an expert on the topic, not. Well, at least I'll have some idea what people are talking about.

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Musings:

    

What I see repeatedly in the article on altruism from the Theological Journal that Sandor sent me is that there is no distinction made between physical survival and existential survival.  When the issue is truly physical survival, that is one thing. But purely existential (defined here as a person's understanding of their existence, who they are for and to themselves and others)occurs when physical survival is not an issue or only becomes an issue when the unconscious mind confuses physical and existential survival. 

Where do physical survival end and existential survival begin? There is an overlap. Physical survival is obvious: Do we have enough air, water, food, and protection from the elements?  For the hunter-gatherers, a person's place in the group (their existential self) was connected to their survival.  They could be censored, exiled, or killed outright if they violated the group's rules. Exile in that environment seriously threatened life by removing protection from the physical elements.

What is pure existential survival? At what point do I stop being me? My poor husband complained from his sickbed, from which he couldn't even rise to go to the bathroom, that he was no longer a person.  I challenged that notion but never knew if my argument was effective. One visitor commented upon seeing Mike with tubes coming in and out of his body that he had lost his dignity. I challenged that, too.  His dignity was in his soul. He was an amazing man who did his best throughout his life. Here he was facing a dark night of the soul; I argue that challenge that does not reduce dignity.  And then there is a third example.

During the banking crisis, the government appointed Kenneth Feinberg to negotiate the deals.  Major players had to take pay cuts.  Feinberg met with these folks individually to tell them what their pay cut would be. (I'm sorry if these details are a bit fuzzy. I heard this story on NPR a while ago.) He expected these men (They were mostly, if not exclusively, men) to say, "Well, I guess I will have to give up my third home and yacht." Instead, when told they would have to accept a salary of $1,000,000 versus $ 5,000,000, they said, "I can't. I'm a man who earns $5,000,000 a year." This was their idea of their existence, what made them who they were. Most people will say, "This is just ego." What is the ego, but our definition of who and what we are?  The ego isn't all negative. It's our story. It's who we think we are. The ego can be either functional or dysfunctional. 

But we all have ideas of who we are and what is right, our beliefs, our way of doing things, etc.  When someone tells us we're wrong or should change, we can experience this as a threat to our existential existence.  The nonconscious mind confuses the danger to our existential survival with our physical survival.  Our unconscious mind doesn't always see the difference, as when genocides are launched because the other group is different and subsequently dehumanized and demonized, providing permission for a plan of annihilation. Oh, we poor, sad human beings.