Wednesday, May 12, 2021
Another bad night's sleep. Tonight, it was leg pain. Also, I woke up in the middle of the night, compelled to reconfigure the second floor of my niece's house. My sister told me they were looking for another place because they could see that the one they had was not ideal for raising kids. I quieted my mind by texting my niece in the middle of the night. I suggested they hire an architect and be prepared to gut the upstairs. She wrote back that they were considering employing an architect to dig out their basement and reconfigure the first floor, Sounds like they should move out for a year and let the builders at it. The downstairs seems reasonable to me. The upstairs is poorly designed. There's a lot of wasted space. I suspect that a childless couple intended it for their needs. The master bedroom, dressing area, and master bath take up one side of the house.
I made arrangements to see adolescent G at his house. His mother told me his handwriting was a huge problem. It was so bad that he couldn't fill out an application form. I wanted to observe the mechanics of his writing.
We sat at an outdoor picnic table. G's basic mechanics looked pretty good when he first wrote. Later on, it came out that he did lock his arm and moved only from his wrist. That makes fluent writing almost impossible. The arm must be moved from the shoulder with the wrist locked in place. When I explained that to him, he understood immediatey; he had similar instructions from his tennis instructor. He was able to apply what he knew from tennis to his handwriting, at least at that moment. Changing a deeply engrained pattern is another matter.
The Step Up Tutoring Program was offering a workshop for tutors. I try to attend all of them unless it is how to motivate students. I think I'm pretty good at that. As I write this, I think, "Who knows. I might learn something new." This workshop was about Discovery Education which provides videos on educational subjects that children can watch. I've worked with some of the lessons and was impressed. The videos are clear, and the follow-up exercises seem better than anything I had as a child or saw when I was teaching a class. The only problem with the video system is that it promotes social isolation. You can have a whole class watching the same video with no two people at precisely the same point. That means no neurological entraining. That entraining is a necessary human social experience. We need to have times when we all respond to the same stimuli simultaneously. While Discovery Education offers excellent videos, it winds up it does not provide many downloadable texts the tutor can view at the same time as the student. I know there was a program available to my student with reading selections.
I had the Grief Workshop today with Yoga Farms Ithaca. As usual, I watched it/ listened to it while lying down on the sofa so I could allow whatever healing energy came through to knock me out and do its thing. The theme was surrendering. Daniela said something about surrendering pain (giving it up)- or was it surrendering to our pain? I got an insight and was able to adjust. I'm super sensitive to any sensations in my body. As a result, I feel psychological disturbances easily. Bad feelings are as annoying to me as they are to anyone else. From my training in Buddhist meditation, I know the negative impact of craving and aversion. I feel an aversion to my discomfort, which magnifies it. I surrendered to my pain. It worked.
I had M today. Last week, she was a psychological mess. She looked distraught, and her face was twitching. One of her best friends in school had been diagnosed with Covid. As a result, her whole class had to stay home and be quarantined. She had to wear a mask at home not to jeopardize her family. It was very hard on her. Today, she looked like her old self. She told me she was going back to school on Tuesday. We continued with the sixth-grade inferencing work using Barnell loft. She is acing this work. We also started writing a story. Wow! she described someone dressed as a Goth. She didn't even know what that meant. I showed her images from the internet. I'm concerned her parents will have my head for allowing her to write about something like this. However, it looks like she's heading for writing about something magical. I still don't know how her parents will respond; they're Muslim.
I continued with the fourth-grade work with adolescent D. His unwillingness to acknowledge improvement is upsetting, actually worrying. His attitude interferes with his learning. I have to be careful not to give him simple exercises that feed into his self-sabotage. Today I told him that once he can read the fourth-grade material smoothly, he can read at any grade level. After fourth grade, the emphasis is no longer on decoding; it's on developing language skills: understanding complex sentence structures, advanced vocabulary, story structure, understanding metaphors and similes, grasping mood, author's intent etc., etc. The basic decoding skills are the same once you're good at the fourth-grade level. After that, it's just applying what you know to new words. I showed him a sample of the text on the eighth-grade level from Barnell and Loft. I asked him if he preferred to work at this level. He said yes. Okay. He has the language skills to understand the language; all he's missing is the ability to decode the words.
My last student of the day was I. We started writing. When I asked her to think of a color, she said purple. I couldn't get her to identify a purple object. I had her write about why purple was her favorite color. She has said that she doesn't like to write. Once I had a topic, I assured her that it was on me to make sure that she had something to say. I ask questions. I write down everything they say. I managed to get four paragraphs out of her. She wrote about how she loved grapes and how purple was Justin Bieber's favorite color; he was her favorite performer. She was amazed that she had that much to say.
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