Monday, October 25, 2021

  Monday, October 25, 2021

 

  I woke up in the middle of the night, unable to fall asleep easily. I found a Facebook post from the young woman who lived here for six months shortly after Mike died.  She’s back in Switzerland, where she is from.  I liked her post and asked how she was. She said she had been thinking of me, and there I was. It works that way.  We made arrangements to Zoom one morning; well, 8 am for me, 8 pm for her. The problem is there is another friend who doesn’t like her at all, who put me in the middle. My renewed contact with her reminded me of that conflict.

    Since I couldn’t sleep, I took the opportunity to do the toe and foot exercise my PT, Katy, recommended: spread out my toes as widely as possible, then scrunch them together.  Also tried to move the big toe separately, up and down.  It caused cramping all the way up to my hip. OW!  Who knew about that connection?

     I had this weird, unpleasant feeling around my midriff in the early morning hours just below my ribs. I usually associate the sense of shame or sadness with it. This morning, it was just an unpleasant sensation. This is great. That means I may be able to rid myself of my unpleasant feeling. It’s ironic, but the only way to get rid of pain like that is to observe it without wanting to get rid of it.  You need to have a neutral point of view. I was able to observe it. I did the release I usually do, “I release anything negative about my hatred for this sensation and keep anything positive or anything I still need.” And then the opposite, “I release anything negative about my love for this sensation, etc., etc. I fell asleep. I have no idea what happened. Sometime in the future, something will come up, and I will notice that I did not have my usual distressed response. 

         In my last year’s post for the 24th, I rediscovered an understanding of myself.  I was trained in the dialectic and lived my life with that as a major guiding principle. I believe in reconciliation of opposites to produce something new and often better.  I believe in reconciliation between any two opposing positions, including two opposing ones in myself.  I think we all live a ‘he-went-that-away’ lives.  Reducing it to the simplest form possible doesn’t work for me.  Of course, I have had to learn to live with less than I would like. 

    I stopped to talk to Mei as I passed her house. She was at the gate, and Elsa insisted on going onto her property. Mei pointed to her breadfruit tree and asked me if I wanted some.  She was trying to figure out how to use it. I knew Darby and Patrick use ulu (breadfruit) as one of their primary food sources.  I told Mei she should speak to them.  I wrote Darby about Mei’s interest. She answered with some videos she found and said Patrick would be prepared to talk Mei’s ears off on the subject of breadfruit.  I asked Mei for her email address, forwarded Darby’s emails to her. Then I sent Mei’s email address to Darby.  I love fostering these connections.

    I had my Reading office hour today. It’s only one hour from 11 to 12 HawaiianTime.  I had three people today.  I asked each of them what they wanted. The first woman wanted to know how to help her student pronounce the -ed suffix correctly. Her student was in the third grade.  The final suffix is pronounced in three different ways in English. After a final t or d, it is pronounced as /id/ or /ed/. After all other voiced consonants and all vowels, the -ed is pronounced as  /d/. After the unvoiced consonants, it is pronounced at /t/.  Some exceptions, such as wicked and crooked, are pronounced with the /id/ when they are adjectives but pronounced as a /t/ when they are verbs.  I told her she could look up English voiced and unvoiced consonants online.

   The second student wanted information on how to conduct the initial session. I gave her my spiel, which is pretty informal.  When I was through, the first student asked if she could answer that question. She had prepared a PowerPoint with questions which she answered about herself and then had the student answer.  She used standard questions.  The two other participants loved her suggestion. I told her to post her PowerPoint on the Step Up Tutoring Facebook page and ask Julia to include it in the Step Up resources.   I looked up icebreaker questions for children. Now, I can tell other students who need something structured to do something comparable. The questions on the sites I found seemed too sophisticated for our students: would you rather be a narwhale or a unicorn?  For my part, neither. I’m rather attached to my human condition.

  The third participant wanted to know how to teach comprehension.  I teach starting with teaching sentence structure. This is usually ignored when teaching comprehension. It is assumed the students understand the way language works. No!  particularly students who come from homes where another language is spoken, and the parents have a low level of education. Understanding how sentences work is complex.  I teach by asking as many questions about a sentence as I can.  It’s a form of sentence diagramming.  I think it is what I do when I read, only automatically. The whole session was only half an hour. I often do an hour with a single student. All three today were those who prefer a structured approach instead of one requiring improvisational skills.  I don’t have much to offer them.

   I called the local Intermediate school to see what was going on with my application. It was two weeks ago on Monday that I handed it in. At the rate this is going, it will be several months before I get to the next level in the process. Part of that requires that I get an FBI check. That alone will take several weeks if the first set of prints pass muster.  If not, it will be several more weeks.  

    My granite slabs are in for Mike’s and my gravestones.  I called the engraver Brenda recommended the other day and left a message. Today she got back to me.  The process isn’t engraving; it’s a stone inlay.  I could see a sample at her office.  It was just above Kaiser. I was heading there when I got the call.

   My Kaiser appointment was with the plastic surgeon.  I was due for my next round of Botox treatments. The doctor said it looked good; the brow hadn’t drooped that much.  I think it held up because I the acupuncture pen treatments. I saw a big difference after that. The idea behind regular Botox treatments is to keep the offending muscles inactive and allow them to atrophy, so they don’t come online again.  I asked the doctor if he enjoyed his work. He said he loved it and hoped to die with his boots on. I prefer working with people who love doing their jobs.

  As I left the office, my left leg buckled.  This hasn’t happened in a while.  I assumed it had to do with atrophied muscles being called into use. As always, I had to wait and see which direction this was going in.

    Darby sent me more recipes for breadfruit for Mei. I forwarded them to her.

    I had a session with adolescent D in the late afternoon. No, he hadn’t done any reading today, not a word. How does someone in eighth grade have no exposure to the written word in a day of school? I assume he must have had a bad day.  He had a bad day with me.  He was able to read most of the single-syllable words, except for of.  When he hit that word, he blanked out. He only did that once before recently. He did it frequently when we first started.  Then he read it as for; when I told him no, he said from.  This is a common problem. These are words from list #1 of the sight word list. I see kids improve their reading and still have problems with those sight words.  I suspect they went in wrong when they learned them.  They have to be deleted or overridden with extra effort. When it came to the multi-syllable words, he preferred to use the supported strategy of Phase II rather than figure it out himself. I’m okay with that; it allows me to drill the strategy. He names the vowels; I write them down. Then I add the following consonants. He pronounces what we’ve identified so far. Then we add on the rest of the letters. He did better holding sounds separately instead of mushing them together, losing sounds in the process. Hopefully, it is what he’s using in class. He still had problems with reversals of sounds, or is it letters. Given his shifting of sounds from a short vowel sound to a long one, I suspect it is an auditory processing problem. 

      I went for my before-dinner walk with Elsa at 5:30. Later that evening, I got a text from Isaac saying he was out for his evening walk.  My leg had had enough for the day.