I stayed in bed until 6 befor getting Elsa out to do our walk. I am successfully getting more weight onto my left hip, but it causes some discomfort and strain on that leg. We only did 4,000 steps this morning. I like to get 6,000 in the morning walk.
I had my final tutoring session with D. In preparation, I made the multiplication facts flashcards. I was still working with the same facts but changing up presentations. He had scored 100% on the facts when they were always presented in the same order on a single sheet of paper. Now, each fact was presented in four different ways—two on the horizontal axis and two on the vertical axis, in addition to switching the positions of the factors. I had been thinking of using cardboard. I remembered that I have several packets of cardstock left that I have not used. This was great. That means the problems were not only in different formations, but the background colors would be different as well.
First, I went through the cards, keeping the four variations together. When he got the first of the four, he could reel off the answer for the other three. We went through that twice. Yes, he made mistakes when he first saw the problem. I warned him he would. Changing format presents a challenge to memory. Actually, changing the location where you learned something can challenge your memory.
Research was conducted to test people's recall of information in the room where they learned it versus a different location. Those who were tested in the same environment where they learned the information did better on the test. Our memories are fragile. D.'s memory is exceptionally so. Changing up the format and background was enough of a challenge. When he has these down, it will be time to add a few new facts, only a few. Again, I want to challenge his memory, not overwhelm it.
May I add that he actually asked to return to math after we had completed the reading for a while. I asked him if he wanted me to keep the cards in the same order, all four formats in sequence, or to mix them up. He chose to have them mixed up. If nothing else, he is finding this challenging in a fun way enough to ask for the activity. You gotta love it.
He didn't have his book with him for the session and had to go and get it. He came back with the more difficult book, Socks. I heard his mother reprimand him for not being ready for the class and leaving me waiting. I don't know if she also pushed him to work on the harder book.
I let him choose where to start. I hadn't read up to that point, so I didn't know how the story was unfolding. I was committed to using one sentence for the decoding activity, having him say all the letters in the sentence one after another, and then going back and identifying the sounds in the words and which letters represented them. I found a short sentence halfway down the page that I thought would serve that purpose. The exercise proved a challenge for him. I did what I always do when a student gives me the 'wrong' pronunciation for a phoneme in a word: I said to him, "If you say the word that way (pronouncing it using the phoneme he gave), that's right. If you don't say the word that way, it's wrong." Responding that way reminds students to rely on their own speech for determining the sounds in words, rather than relying on some rule they have learned. The latter shows phonemic awareness; the former doesn't.
D. wound up having problems with comprehension. As I hadn't read the story up to that point myself, I asked him if the characters Mr. and Mrs. Bricker were George and Debbie's parents. He said yes. But they're not. He missed the point that Socks was sold to these folks for fifty cents. Socks no longer belonged to the children. Socks, the kitten, was off on his own adventure without them.
I had had a short nap before the class, and now I was ready for another one. Before I lay down, B. called to say he might be interested in buying the Prius, and Scott texted me to tell me he had a friend who might be interested in buying it. When I awoke from the nap, Scott texted that the potential customer from yesterday had become an actively interested one. He would get the cash together today and bring it over tomorrow.
My Prius is decorated with an auto lei. I wondered if I would see my car around town or if he would remove those flower decals. Some of them have already started to peel, and some got dented out of shape in the accident. A lei is a flower necklace fashionable here in Hawaii. It is usually made from flowers or other natural objects. People often receive them in ceremonial situations, such as upon arrival at the airport and being greeted by friends, relatives, and tourist companies, as well as at weddings and funerals.
I dreaded someone making one for me on the occasion of Mike's funeral. They itch. I can stand pain, but not itching. I was concerned about having to refuse one. That would have been a terrible insult, but I would rather have lost all Hawaiian friends than have had to sit through the funeral with that degree of discomfort. As it turned out, a considerate person made a haku, which is a flower crown, instead of the necklace form. She made the longer one to wrap around the box with Mike's ashes.
As I awoke from my second nap, the phone rang. My friend Melissa called to check on how I was doing. She is a doctor who traveled to Seattle to help during the particularly severe COVID-19 outbreak. She said that four of the front-line workers she met had died from the virus, all under sixty years old, none with comorbidity. She also told me that her daughter, an ICU doctor who intubates patients, said she has had four children under 6 die from the virus. Being unable to help these children and just watching them die was the worst.
Schools are being opened here in Hawaii. I think people are overly optimistic about how this will work. I know one schoolteacher who has a four-year-old with severe asthma. Will she risk her child's life by coming to school? There are many teachers here who are older and in the high-risk category. Melissa and I agree that there is no easy solution to protect children from the trauma in this situation. Being out of school is undoubtedly difficult. However, what kind of trauma will be inflicted on these children if their teachers become ill and even die? While we all assume responsibility and blame for things that go wrong around us, children tend to do so more often than adults.
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Musings:
This is on children's inclination to assume blame for things that go wrong.
I don't think there is any argument that children assume responsibility and blame for things that go wrong, like their parents' divorce or someone's death. Some argue that the response is irrational and, therefore, of no consequence. Unfortunately, our irrational thoughts do have an impact on us. Verbal assurances, dismissing those thoughts as irrational, have no impact. Rather, they tell the child that there is something wrong with their thought process, adding to the burden. Now they are not only responsible for something that happened, but they are also crazy to think that.
I think taking responsibility for something that goes wrong in our lives is hard-wired into our brains. As adults, we develop the capacity to silence our thoughts, but not the feelings they create. Is there anyone who still believes that our nonconscious thoughts have no impact on us? Is there anyone who thinks that they are entirely rational and have no unrecognized thoughts lurking in the subconscious? I'm sure there are. However, I have difficulty believing that those currently making decisions about opening schools are among them.
In the past, I have heard people say that when an adult believes they are to blame for something bad that happened, it is because they believe they are special and had control over the situation, which they failed to exercise. Since this is a mental behavior that appears in many people, we should reconsider its origin. Are there people who don't experience this sense of fault? I'm sure many don't experience it consciously. They just deny that they have a non- or subconscious mind. They only identify with their conscious thoughts. Besides that, sociopaths and psychopaths have no sense of responsibility for their fellow man.
Now, why would responsibility and blame be built into the human psyche? Because we are all responsible for each other's welfare. I can hear those say, No, I'm not." Our brain functions were developed over thousands of years, when we were hunter-gatherers and all were responsible for one another. That was the deal. I work to make sure you stay alive, and you work to keep me alive.
Why are we only plagued by negative thoughts, those moments when we failed? No reason to think of successful moments. All went well. When things go bad, we have to rethink the situation to see what we might have done differently; we learn from our mistakes. Also, success is like a period at the end of a sentence. The problem has been solved. Done. Our minds drop it. When there is no positive outcome, there's no period; the release button doesn't get pressed. We wind up thinking and rethinking the moment. Success was the acceptable outcome when we were roaming the savanna. The alternative was death.
In our 21st-century lives, we are not living with the threat of death hanging over our heads in the same way as we did when we were hunter-gatherers. Our nonconscious thoughts don't compute well. They are out of touch with reality. But that doesn't make us crazy any more than bleeding does when our skin is penetrated. This is how we are designed.
I'm not saying we have to take our nonconscious voice literally, but often it gives us valuable information. It needs to be translated into a modern voice, much as we struggle to understand a difficult poem filled with concrete images. The poetic images are understood as analogies. Our unconscious thoughts also provide us with information suitable for our lives on the savanna. But we are not living there now. We are living the 'safe' lives of zoo animals, animals far from their natural environments. We must utilize our human intelligence to negotiate between our conscious and unconscious minds if we are to survive. The threat to our survival now is the man in the mirror.
