Monday, January 24, 2022

 Monday, January 24, 2022

    In one day, I miraculously lost at least two pounds of what I put on in the last two weeks. Who knows what’s going on!  

    Last night, Isaac came over shortly before I went to bed. He had texted me earlier to ask if he could stop by and use my printer. He wanted to create a flyer advertising gardening work for the school grounds. I heard the door close long after I put my light out.

   When I went to bed, my ankle was severely swollen. I was surprised by how bad it was because it didn’t hurt that much. I could feel it was still swollen when I got up early morning to pee. I decided to take an Ibuprofen. I don’t think of taking medication. I need to be reminded it’s an option. I was desperate

    It was becoming clear that the ankle problem had something to do with the muscles higher up on the chain, perhaps because of my arthritic hip. I’ll see my primary physician on the 31st and discuss this. In the meantime, I applied the acupuncture pen to the IT band on the outside of my left thigh. I don’t know which one did the trick, the pen or the Ibuprofen, but the swelling was gone the next mooring. My ankle had all appropriately wrinkled.   After a 1,000+ step walk this morning, my ankle still was not swollen. Maybe addressing soft tissue problems will work.   We’ll see. 

   I contacted the orthopedic surgeon who visited this island for KP a while ago to make a surgical appointment. It would be several months out. I could decide what I wanted to do then. The appointment nurse called once, but I was in a tutoring session. I asked her if I could call her back. No, she would call me the next day. That’s the last I heard. In the meantime, I have been advised by my PT to push for an anterior insertion rather than posterior surgery because of my turned-in hip joints. The doctor that comes here made it plain he only does posterior. Lutz, who worked for Kaiser, said, “Ask for another doctor.” 

   At 10, I participated in the LAUSD math workshop. Today the instructor covered how to teach solving word problems. The emphasis is on concepts rather than memorization. It ties in with my approach to reading: teach the student, not the material. I love the presentations this woman makes. While it was hard for me to make the switch, I have learned to love how they teach math now. Folks like me learned the old way, memorizing math facts and algorithms. I did reasonably well with math. I figured out the concepts on my own. I also had my math facts and algorithms memorized. They were handy things to take through life. I couldn’t imagine not teaching it to kids. When I was in my thirties, I learned mental math, counting by-tens, and doing math in my head from a boy I was teaching to read. He couldn’t read at all. It’s made a huge difference in my life.

   At 11 am, I had my reading office hours. I had one tutor show. Her student was a fourth-grader who had trouble reading longer words. I showed her the procedure from Phase II of The Phonics Discovery System. I just pulled up the PowerPoint presentation I had saved on my computer. It’s a good reference. 

    She was also looking for material to use for reading with her student. I suggested that she use co-writing to develop reading material. In co-writing, the teacher can get ideas from the student and form them into a story. It follows the ideas of Whole Language Learning. The battle between that camp and the phonics camp is ridiculous. Of course, you need both. However, there is the time factor. Both these skills can be taught within the time frame with my methods. Co-writing is more difficult if the teacher does the writing while the student dictates it. It can’t be done with a group that easily. Although, I did read about one teacher who developed this as a group activity.

   I thought I would feel better after the session with the tutor. Instead, I felt worse. I don’t think the session was unsuccessful. I don’t know what is going on. It felt as if my internal organs were heavy, so heavy I couldn’t do much else. Grief had clearly hit- a lifetime of unresolved grief: grief I had from before my sister’s birth, grief over events in my life, grief over the death of my father, which I clearly didn’t deal with at the time, and now grief over my loss of Mike and a safe, comfortable, loving relationship. How lucky was I to have had that for forty-five years?

  I watched a YouTube video of Betty White’s funniest lines in Hot in Cleveland. I laughed. I felt much better. Now, how bad off can I be if fifteen minutes of comedy can improve my mood? I looked up a list of comedies. Some of the names I recognized and decided against. They don’t match my idea of comedy. Too mean-spirited.

   My ankle felt well enough to go out and spray the weeds in the front yard with vinegar. It’s been a while, and the weeds were bad. It started to rain, and I didn’t get it all done.  

    I took a nap. I set my alarm for 3:50 for my 4 pm session with the M & W sisters. My phone beeped, announcing a text. I ignored it. I actually hoped it was their mom canceling. I found interacting with others this morning overwhelming.   No, she wanted to know if we were on for 3:00 or 3:30. It was already after 3 pm. I texted her at 3:30 and got myself in gear.

   The sessions went well. My mood was much improved. The heaviness was gone. Both girls had problems reading accurately. I made it into a game. With first-grade M, the deal was she could make mistakes, but she couldn’t do so, ignoring the letters on the page. She could also say she didn’t know a word. I would give it to her. She couldn’t say something that bore no resemblance to what was there. I created a ‘bouncing ball’ (does anyone remember the bouncing ball in the comics at the end of animated movies?)  and rewarded her with a mark at the end of a line if she did what I asked. She did pretty well.

    Fifth-grade W showed hatred for this activity yesterday. She hated using that level of concentration when she edited her last story. This morning, I modified the text to embed errors she had to find. She loved it. She likes doing word search games. She finally saw the relationship between that game and editing. She read every word accurately and found most of the errors. She missed one. I was going to show her where it was. She said, “No. Let me find it.”   We started the day with editing for capitals and periods. I used a story she had previously written and removed all the caps, commas, and periods. She did well with this. At least she did well determining where the sentences began and ended. She just ignored the capitals.

    After 81 years of struggling with my ill-formed eyebrows, I have figured out how to deal with them. My mom loved my long eyelashes that hung down on my cheeks when I cried. She wasn’t so excited about my eyebrows.   They grew downward. I haven’t looked at everyone’s, but I know that most people’s grow up. My mother would tell me to train my eyebrows so they went up. No, that’s not the way it works. 

     In my fifties, I learned that people not only plucked their eyebrows but trimmed them as well. I would brush my eyebrows up and cut off the long hairs. It is only now that it occurred to me to brush them down, go with the hair growth pattern, and then cut off the excess. Wow! They look halfway decent. Well, they look normal.

  Isaac stopped by to drop off the aluminum foil he promised me last week. He told me he finally started watching my Phase I, The Phonics Discovery System video. He tried it with his students the next day. He said they immediately tried out the process on other words. Yep, that’s the way it works. It teaches students how to discover the relationship between the sounds of the language and the letters that represent them. It teaches them how to become independent learners.

  I was reading Batchelor’s The Art of Loneliness. He says it’s just part of the human condition. We have to learn to deal with it. I love the feeling of aloneness. It is so clean. But the feeling of loneliness is horrible. Following my theories of the human condition embedded in evolutionary psychology, loneliness is associated with death. In the days of the early hunter-gatherers, being totally alone and abandoned did mean death.. You couldn’t be away from your tribemates too long without dying. We were intimately dependent on each other, as all children are these days. Loneliness is scary. Terrifying. 

   Batchelor is a Buddhist. Buddhism advocates abstinence from all substances that chemically induce mental changes. (I’m not sure about their position on anti-depressants these days.)  Batchelor endorses the use of psychedelics. He points out they have been used for millenniums by ‘primitive’ people for spiritual development.  

   Is the blight of loneliness worse now than in earlier times? Now, we can live alone. That wasn’t possible in earlier times. We were in constant contact with others. We were lucky if we ever had time alone. Our ancestors were always connected to something larger than themselves. Did that relieve the chronic loneliness of the human condition?