I had to cut my walk short this morning because my leg needed a rest. That’s okay because I’ve been working it hard, lifting my knees high as I walk and then pushing hard on my upper thighs as I straighten each leg. I alternate my focus as I walk, doing twenty steps focusing on raising my knees and then the next twenty focusing on straightening my leg as I push through. Elsa wasn’t sorry to have a slightly earlier breakfast.
I meditated for an hour. Elsa didn’t follow her usual pattern of resting her head on my left foot as I sat there. I like it when she does that. Maybe my meditation wasn’t to her liking today. After meditating, I was ready for a nap. My inner thigh muscle on my left leg, otherwise known as Michael’s muscle, because he was the one who wrenched it, hurting it badly. Again, I have to wonder, “Is this it? Have I pushed that leg as far as it can go? Am I now in a position where some nerve is being pressed on forever? I shifted slightly onto the right buttock from lying flat on my back, and the pain disappeared- a bit better than a total hip replacement. When I got up, everything was good.
I called Judy. She stopped by yesterday on her way to church with her grandson Luke. I hadn’t seen him in quite a while. Luke is severely disabled. He is missing substantial portions of his brain. He will never come close to being normal. He turned three yesterday and has the development of a two to four-month-old child. His awareness of the world around him is that of a plant. Only there is one big difference. He can look happy, in the human sense. He is much loved by this family. He is one lucky little boy.
While speaking to Judy, I got the laundry off the line and threw it into the dryer. It had been out there for several days, getting wetter in the rain, drying, and getting wet again. It was dry enough so that a few minutes in the dryer would do the trick. As I put my clothes away, I noticed that those in the drawer were damp. The humidity makes everything dank of late. We don’t usually have that kind of weather at this altitude.
It is always humid at the shoreline. You can imagine. It is also very humid once you get above a certain height on the mountain. Yvette and Josh were renting a place at 14,000 feet. Yuck! It was always clammy. In anticipation of our visit, they would wipe the mold off the furniture and walls. When I got into bed at night, that dank cold penetrated my body. Thank God I’m a warm-blooded animal. I could provide my own heat and warm up the bed. Yvette and Josh had one room they used to store their clothes and books, a dry room. They ran a dehumidifier in there 24/7. The house we bought together is in ‘the sweet spot,” cooler than at the shoreline with less humidity. I hope the change we are experiencing isn’t a result of climate change.
I had an appointment with D. this morning. As I have been writing my article, it has become more apparent that after students have mastered phonemic awareness, we want them to start chunking sound units, an, ane, en, ene, pl, br, etc. D. doesn’t do this. Most students do that automatically after a while of working with the basic sound units, the phonemes. He doesn’t. I did some word family work. Op, bop, cop, all’s good. Then we hit pop, and he read it as pope. Sometimes I think there is no hope, but I know that he has gotten better. It’s just taking forever. I tried my BrainManagementSkills with him a year ago. It didn’t do much. Maybe I should try again. He’s there to remind me that I’m not Wonder Woman, and my methods don’t work with everyone.
Today, I had my first session with J., the LA Step-Up Tutoring Program student assigned to me. The organization is working with the LA school district bringing volunteer tutors together with students.
Damon introduced me to this program. I was complaining that I didn’t have enough people to work with. The teachers I worked with last year only assigned one student to work with me, D. As far as I’m concerned, everyone can use a boot-up. But no.
I needed a refresher course on how to connect with the special Zoom connection through the Step-Up Program. Julia, the tech specialist from the tutoring program, spent a good twenty minutes with me. I still can’t do it on my own. Also, my computer does wonky things that even confuse her.
J.’s mom speaks no English. Step Up Tutoring provides this remarkable program called Remind, which translates the written word into different languages so teachers can communicate with parents.
J. said he needed help with math, ratios. He’s in sixth grade. That’s what they are working on currently. I asked him how his reading was. He said, okay. He was able to pull up a reading program to share with me. He pulled up an article about Brazil that was rated a T. When I looked that up after the session, T was at the beginning of 5th grade. He read the article out loud with accuracy. After the eighth page, I asked him to check how long the article was. Sixteen pages. I suggested that we should start on the comprehension questions.
With a little bit of help, he got the first one. The second one was more complicated. It asked why Portuguese was the language of Brazil. The first sentence was some, like Brazilians, come from many different backgrounds. Oh, boy. It came out that he had no idea what Brazilians were. He didn’t know it referred to people. His family is from Guatemala. I asked him if he knew the difference between the words Guatemala and Guatemalan. No, he did not. His background knowledge and language comprehension skills were poor. That’s what we were going to work on.
Besides the difference between Brazil and the Brazilians, we covered the location of Guatemala, Brazil, the difference between the Americas and Europe. He had no idea that there was a Europe, no less its role in the Americas. He had heard of the American Revolution but had no idea what it was about. He had no idea why Spanish was the dominant language of Guatemala. Then we had to figure out why Portuguese is the primary language of Brazil. Oh, boy. We cover one sentence in an hour. That’s how it will go until we can cover two sentences in an hour.
I have used this slow deep method with several people. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but it works like a charm. I got the idea for it after listening to a speaker at a symposium at Princeton University. He talked about programming information into computers. He said they took one sentence and programmed all the necessary information to understand that one sentence, for example, “The ball rolled down the street.” Think of all the concepts that must be understood before you can understand that sentence. From there, they did a second sentence. There was a geometric increase in information.
It poured while I worked with J. So much for the laundry; I had hung it up. I would have to take out another set of bed sheets if I wanted a made bed to sleep in. I was going to take a walk on the beach to complete my 10,000 steps for the day. I hadn’t completed my 6,000 steps in the morning. I was too tired to do anything other than sleep. I woke up an hour and a half later. I did some walking in the house and then walked long enough to hit 9,500 in my-before dinner walk. The pedometer app on my phone has me well trained. I must get in those 10,0000 steps a day. I must see the app turn green and rain down green flakes.
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