Monday, June 14, 2021
Before I was up, I got a text from Julia from Step Up Tutoring to tell me that no one had signed up for reading support today. Very disappointing. I get energy from trying to solve the tutors' problems with their kids. The problem is that I only have one hour with them. I try to cram all I know into that hour. I have had as many as three people to deal with at once. Sometimes the problems they present are similar, sometimes not.
I woke up early in the morning and wound-up obsessing again. I wondered why I did this. It doesn't help me resolve my problems with another person and makes me feel lousy. I asked myself that question; I got my answer. It deflects feelings of loneliness. Now I wondered if this pattern of mentally arguing with people started before or after my dad died.
Dorothy once said that after our dad died, she remembered feeling lonely in the school playground. I was surprised. I didn't remember feeling lonely. Given the problematic relationship with my mother, I suspect I just felt scared. I didn't have the emotional space to feel lonely. If I think about it, I remember feeling lonely even before my sister was born. My mother and I were never on the same wavelength. I always felt like she was a whirlwind; she never held still enough for me to grasp her and feel her presence. What a mismatch!
Facing loneliness now feels sad and painful, but the only way to go. Mike was a remedy for that feeling but not 100%. I always suffered from underlying feelings of anxiety. He once said to me, "Someday, you will start crying, and you won't be able to stop. Call me immediately." Guess this is what I'm going to have to deal with now. However, calling him is not an option. I do feel totally alone. When Mike was alive, I knew he always had me in mind. There was a chord connecting us; we continuously monitored each other's whereabouts and well-being. I have no one watching out for me anymore, well, not in the same way. Feeling lonely doesn't feel good but sticking with that feeling leaves me feeling calmer and less agitated than forcing connections through argument,
I have a half-hour session daily with adolescent D over the summer. I discovered he didn't know the names of the vowel letters. When I asked, he said, "O .. .E," He said, "I forgot," defensively, as if this should be okay. I told him that if he came out of anesthesia after surgery, and someone asked him what the vowel letters were, he should say, "A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y." It should be that embedded in his mind. The vowels are the cornerstones of every syllable. The vowel and the surrounding letters determine the phonics pattern. Readers must know the vowel letters and become vowel hunters.
I have him reading a paragraph from a graded text on a 7th-grade level over and over. He is reading the words with more confidence. He still gets stuck on some, like the word silence. And he still makes mistakes with words like they and then. After he had read the whole paragraph, I picked one word or even one syllable. I identify the pattern. Then I go through the alphabet, having him blend the consonants with the syllable pattern. Slowly he is getting better. The goal is fostering pattern recognition, not necessarily of any particular pattern. I want him to get to the point where he can say, "The pattern in his word is . . .," and then generate other words switching out the initial consonants himself.
I also started having him spell simple words. He dictates them, and I write them on the Zoom whiteboard. Pat, prat, etc. He has handwriting problems—one thing at a time.
Later in the day, I had a session with I. The school insisted she attend summer school. I. was in a costly, very academically challenging private school. Her teacher last year was brutal. I had been working on writing to promote verbal expression skills. She has a great imagination. We have been writing a book about a little girl who became a superhero's sidekick. However, she doesn't have the words to express these ideas. I think the school is concerned about her verbal expression. While she got many complaints from the teacher that she never spoke up, I don't think they understood the problem. I asked her if she didn't speak up because she was afraid she would say it wrong. She said yes. If she doesn't practice expressing herself, she will never learn.
Mom told me that the school had assigned Stuart Little for summer reading. I ordered it on Kindle. I loved this book when I was a child. It was one of my favorites. Reading it now, I realize the story makes it seem that Mrs. Little actually gave birth to Stuart. I. said he became part of the family through adoption. I helped her see what was really said. Later, I thought I doubted that I understood that when I first read it. Now, it seemed evident to me. I have to go back over this with her. The rest of the story seems obvious. It's just Stuart's adventures. I read the introduction to the book this time. Apparently, E.B. While was unusually small. I think this is a story about himself. It sounds like something he would do.
My blog numbers have dropped from over one hundred to less than ten, and no one is from Turkey. It is more evidence that my blog has become a class assignment; I assume from some teacher teaching the English language in Turkey. Glad I'm doing someone some good. While my numbers have dropped precipitously, and I even had zero readers one day, they are frequently between two and seven. The first year the blog was public, they ran between zero and two, with more zeroes.
On writing these updates and entering them a year later to the public blog: Sometimes, it seems like a burden I'd like to put down, but I know it gives my life shape and some meaning. Putting it down would be the worst thing I could do for myself.
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