Wednesday, February 3, 2021
I completed close to 6,000 steps on my morning walk. I hope to complete 10,000 every day, although I missed that mark by 1,000 yesterday. I just didn't have it in me.
On my walk, I ran into a young woman I had met before. I knew her name. She was visiting her in-laws who live on our block. It's a Russian family; we have many such families here on the island.
The young woman said, "I'm married to their son." That triggered some emotion. I never felt 'married' to Mike in the legal and social sense, but I felt married to him as someone might be 'married to their work." In that sense, we were very, very married. I miss that connection. I miss being part of that group of two. I miss having someone who was always somewhere in my consciousness. I miss having someone who I always knew where he was. I miss Mike.
I know a legal marriage does not guarantee being married. I had a friend years ago who told me about how miserable she was in her first marriage. Her husband was never home. She said she felt so lonely in their shared home that sometimes she would spend the night in a motel to escape the feeling. I never felt lonely in my shared life with Mike. He was a wonderful life partner.
I called the tech support at the local elementary school. I realized I had two sets of numbers for D to connect to Google programs. I got Cathi today, whereas I always got either Jeff or Mike before. Wow! What a difference. She took me through all the steps to connect with D on Google Classroom and Google Meet. I wondered why none of the other people I had spoken to led me through these steps. And then I said, "Oh, yes. They're boys." The 'boys' were helpful, but I didn't think through all the steps I would need to go through. That took about forty-five minutes. After all that, D. was not available today. His mother had forgotten it was Wednesday, and he was at his grandmother's. I hope I remember everything I learned today when I see him on Friday.
I continued working on updates, blog entries, and gardening. I continued clipping back the bougainvillea.
I had M at 2 pm. I had prepared more inferencing exercises, but she asked if she could get help on something she didn't understand. I'm not sure what the question was she had to answer; she couldn't find the work. It had something to do with the word 'metallic.' She had to define other words with that suffix. The only other word that came to mind immediately was the word alcoholic. She quickly understood that the -ic suffix meant that something had the quality of or resembled something. That something could be identified by figuring out the based word. She came up with economic. Not bad. I came up with Islamic, and comic. The latter was a stretch. She came up with garlic. I checked the etymology online. The -ic wasn't a suffix; it was a slightly altered pronunciation of the original word from another language.
We did some work on inferencing. M did reasonably well on several of them. She had a problem figuring out an answer to one question where people played a small wind instrument. It was so popular that you could hear it at boxing matches. She had to choose between "some people played it" and "most people played it." She picked some because she said it wasn't everyone. However, when I asked her if she thought some or most high school students had cell phones, she didn't hesitate to say most. I covered what these terms of quantity defined.
I had the little first grader I worked with yesterday. She read to me again. All goes well until I try to give some correction or instruction. She shifts painfully at that point. I may be wrong, but mom is always on her case, from what I've observed. The girl was doing fine with me, and mom interrupted to tell her how to behave. It was very upsetting. Mom is bullying her daughter. Mom is the problem as far as I've seen so far. I was upset by what I saw.
Next, I had J. it was supposed to be a half-hour session, making up for the half-hour we had to miss yesterday. We continued working on those math problems. I had worked on the one with the worm that moved at the rate of 2.5cm a minute. I was thrown by the problem because of the uneven answer. I'm used to school math problems having neat solutions. I thought I was doing something wrong.
He continued to have problems understanding until I compared the worms moving at 2.5cm a minute to his dad doing 60 mph on a trip to San Diego. Then he got how the problem worked. He asked for help on his remaining math problems. These are a challenge for me. I had to pull up what I remembered about the ratio on one of them. I hope I did the problem correctly. He did some of the work on his own once he understood what had to be done. I don't know how much he understood versus what I understood. Hopefully, he is learning from my struggles with these problems.
In the middle of my session with J, the phone rang. It was the father of a girl with whom I had a five o'clock appointment. They were off to gymnastics again. He wants her prepped to write an essay on her recently deceased mother as part of an entrance exam for a high-end private school. If she's a good writer already, I can probably pull it off in one session; if not, - oh, well. I have no idea what his priorities are. While I couldn't talk while working with J, I did call while on my before-dinner walk. He didn't answer. I suspect he won't be calling me back. It may be that the girl doesn't want to work with me. Mind, she knows nothing about me. She just knows dad is anxious. That's always a downer. Whatever! It will be what it will be.
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Musings:
Today on NPR, I heard that conservative whites are concerned about becoming a minority. Ironic, since they created this condition.
Since every person 'tainted' by one drop of black blood was considered black, this very prejudice has swelled those numbers.
Why didn't one drop of white blood make someone white? Think how different the statistics would look then.
Then, there is the terror of how blacks will treat whites if they become the economic and political majority. OMG! If they treat us the way we've treated them, we have a great deal to fear.
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