Monday, December 27, 2021

 Monday, December 27, 2021 

 

  My ankle hurt while I did the first walk in the morning. I couldn't move my left foot through the full range of motion as I did yesterday as I walked through the Costco parking lot.

    My replacement visa card finally arrived, and I could shop at Costco again. As I walked through the parking lot, I was inspired to push my feet through their full range of motion. Wow! That felt great. Again, after a bad bout of discomfort or pain, I experience a burst of improvement. I couldn't execute that move this morning because of the tightness in my ankle. 

Then when I got home, I needed Ibuprofen and iced the sore joint. When I went out for my next walk after posting the day's blog, it was a different story. I was cruising along like a young girl, well, a younger girl. 

    I am suffering from loneliness. I miss continuous companionship to the point that I feel physical discomfort. I guess I'm in another period of grief. I haven't had anyone who just does their own thing in my home for close to a year now. The last time I had anyone in the house like that was when Damon, Cylin, and August visited for Mike's interment. I have visitors in the house, but they come for a purpose. We exchange conversation, and then they leave. The only moment of sitting quietly with someone was the moments I shared with Paulette sitting with her on their lanai. Also, I helped her shell mac nuts. That was another shared moment.

    Jean, my hanai sister, and her husband John moved into a retirement community in New Jersey, in a neighboring town. They are incredibly happy. They like the apartment they moved into. I'm sure that just getting rid of a house full of stuff was part of the relief. John lived there for 55 years, Jean since the early 80s. They were both collectors of books and papers. They had raised three children in that house. You get the picture. Now, they can go to the cafeteria and get food and see other people. There's a medical team on staff if it should be needed. I'm beginning to wonder if Mike and I didn't make the wrong decision. If Mike had lived, it would have been a disaster. Because of his kidney failure, we wouldn't have been able to return home. Mike would have to have gone to a nursing home on Oahu. We couldn't do dialysis at home. He didn't have the necessary port. They couldn't have installedl it because he was too weak. I wouldn't have been able to get him to the dialysis center. He would have been too weak. Not to mention, the whole process would have been torture. Dialysis was torture before he fell ill with pancreatitis. While in the hospital, he had to have dialysis regularly. To say he hated the process would have been somewhat of an understatement.

  When I think about the situation as objectively as possible, I don't think I could be happier someplace else, in a retirement community the way Jean and John are. I would still be alone, and I wouldn't be in nature 24/7 as I am here. I would still have only functional contact with other people. I would see other residents to hold conversations or the staff to get something done. I guess loneliness is just in the cards for now and maybe for the rest of my life.

    I must say, Elsa is becoming more companionable. She always came to be held when she heard a loud noise. She would be tense in my arms, standing on my lap. Recently, she started relaxing in my lap, laying down, resting her head on my chest. This is a huge difference. 

    I had the M & W sisters this morning. I am doing Phase III with both. I could hear mom in the background. I don't know if she observes every class.    If she does, I don't know why. Is she monitoring me? Does she find the work interesting? I have no idea. I suspect she is a grade-A control freak. Both the girls were tense with me to start. I think they have both relaxed.

   When I started with first grade M this morning, I was concerned that I was too overwhelmed with grief to function well. But it subsided. I have been working on producing a melodious voice.  

    I have often said speaking is a form of singing, and singing is just speaking writ large. Today, I worked on talking as if I was singing. I created a different vocal tone, which is more soothing for me and hope for the people I'm speaking to.

     I continued with Phase III with M, using the story she wrote a while ago. She read a sentence in the text, selected how much of the sentence she wanted to work on, a phrase, a clause, or the complete sentence, and then without looking back, dictated each word to me, spelling it. I use this process to teach students to use their knowledge to figure things out. 

   I did the same thing with fifth grade W.  While I introduced the comma to M, W already knew about it. Today, we talked a bit about dependent and independent clauses, why "I woke up" became a dependent clause when you added the word 'when' as in, "When I woke up, …."

    Let me tell you, the more I use this process in Phase III, the more I realize what a gold mine it is. There is so much I can teach using this single vehicle. 

a. Auditory recall, which impacts both writing and listening skills.

b. Correct grammar and/or complex sentence structure.

 1. Punctuation

       2. Sentence structure, phrases, clauses versus complete sentences.

       

c. Spelling

d. Reading accuracy and fluency.

W had problems reading the little words and suffixes accurately. Today, she reported that she is seeing improvement in those areas. I asked mom about it. She said she is inconsistent but admitted she's better. It's been hard to get Mom to say anything positive.

 

      When I came home from one of my short walks, I took a nap. As I woke, I noticed my breathing. It has been much faster since Mike died. I would watch his breathing when he was alive. For every one and a half or two of his breaths, I would take one. Now, I hear my breathing pattern is as fast as his. This is fear. In my talk with Mowg, we had discussed how religion serves as a coping mechanism for many people. I hear people talk about God's love. That's what I miss from Mike. No one makes me feel loved as he did. I don't know if his love was better than anyone else's. It was a good match for my love receptors as I was a good match for his. Well, Mike is gone. I need to be loved to be at peace. I just said, "I welcome God's love." I felt a stream of light flow into me from above. My breathing pattern changed immediately. I recalled Elizabeth Gilbert talking about asking for support from the universe and getting love as a response. It's definitely helpful.  

When I woke up, I saw a text from adolescent D's mom, saying that we were on today for 1 pm after telling me that we weren't meeting today. It was already 10 after. I sent D a text, saying that I would be on in a minute. Once I send the link, I call D. He never answers but signs in shortly after. I was not sure he got my late text message, so I called his mom. While I was on the phone with her, he signed on. 

  Before we started the session, I asked him about his Christmas. Again, I noticed him struggling to find the words to express himself. This is a problem. It will interfere with academic success. 

  We did Phase III with the paragraph, where he had to read a sentence, remember it, and dictate it to me, spelling each word. He did an amazing job. There were moments where he took my breath away, not because he got the word correctly but because he was able to make an effort, take a risk,  and take correction. I could never have done that with him nine months ago. He was all self-protection. On the other hand, he continued to make mistakes, ignoring letters or sounds in words.  

 I asked him if his mom told him she had listened to the recording of him reading I sent her. She said no. I called her to ask her if she had listened to it. Yes. Please, give him positive feedback no matter what you think. I have many parents who don't give their kids positive feedback. Drives me nuts. In this case, she was concerned about his shyness. She thought she was respecting his boundaries. I told her I was teaching risk-taking and self-teaching as much if not more than the essentials of reading, the relationship of the sounds and the letters. She said she saw impressive differences in him. He received several cards for Christmas. His mom asked him if he wanted her to read them. He said no and stood up in front of his parents and sister and read them himself. Wow! Wow! Wow! on so many counts. First off that he took the risk and let others see him. Secondly, he was able to read the cards. I told her that he spelled boat at bote. She was thrilled. Yes, I know that's not the correct spelling. It gave me the opportunity to review all the spellings for the long o. Ote is one of them when you have a consonant sound after the o sound in the same syllable. Oa, and oe (as in toe) are two more off the top of my head. There are probably a few more. It's English. His mother was thrilled. There is no way he could have come close to sounding it out before. Every time he came close to spelling a word correctly, I ran his spelling through spell check and had him select the correct one. He spelled both, bofe. I asked him to check his pronunciation. Did he say it with his teeth pressing into his tongue or his lower lip? He said, his lower lip. I tried pronouncing it that way in a sentence. You can't tell the difference. I bet we do usually say bofe for both in conversation. It takes less energy to pronounce the f than the th.

  I left for Target after I was through with adolescent D.  I needed a new toothbrush, more dental floss, and a bigger bottle of Ibuprofen. I had their smallest bottle, 24 pills, and went through it in two weeks. I took one or two pills a day. That is more than I've taken in a lifetime. I bought a bottle with 200 pills now. I was afraid of running out. While my ankle is better, and I'm optimistic it will be completely okay in a month, it imposes serious limits on me for now.

   The more I use Phase III with the students, the more I realize its value as a teaching device. It serves as a diagnostic purpose as well as a teaching one. The student reveals what they know and don't know as we work. I do impromptu lessons as we go along. Today with adolescent D.  the word 'asked' came up in the text. I instructed D to isolate the base word, ask, to make the spelling easier. It did help. He was able to spell the word by sounding it out. He got stuck on the -ed. The -ed is pronounced as a /t/in the word' asked'. You have to know when to use the suffix -ed. We talked about verbs. Did he know what a verb was? Yes, a person, place, or thing. Those are nouns. We talked about what a verb was how to tell a verb. Now, sometimes a verb acts as a noun. Complicated and confusing. It's English.