Thursday, July 1, 2021

 Thursday, July 1, 2021

 

     I slept very well. I felt zero discomfort the whole night. The muscles around the hip bothered me when I walked but not when I slept. Again, I am at that junction: is this a transition or the end? Whatever else may be going on, I know I have a large bone spur in my left hip.

There was a text on my phone when I woke up. Jean’s daughter was all right. She texted me yesterday saying she was taken to the emergency room. While her condition isn’t joyful, it is also not serious in any immediate sense. 

      I called Dorothy this morning to tell her something I forgot the other day. Grammarly offers in-person editing- for a price. Dorothy is an incredible editor. She has been so helpful to me, invaluable, head and shoulders above anyone else. Others have changed a comma here or there, including Mike. Dorothy was the only one who thinks about the meaning of a sentence or how the sentence fits into the rest of the paragraph, the order of the paragraphs, etc. Invaluable. I encouraged her to do this professionally in the past. I tried again this morning. She could earn a fortune, not to mention also have so much fun.

     Scott led the yoga class today. He was so nervous. We kept assuring him he was fine. If he forgot the order, we could remind him. We just needed someone to be the leader. Yvette did something very different today. At 7:30, she asked us to sit up and passed out Dove chocolate bits. The other day she had read a passage advising us to meditate on chocolate. We were to place it in our mouths and observe it melting and feel the difference in texture and taste as it does. She ended the class shortly after because Deb, one of the participants, had an announcement to make. She will be moving to Seattle. Her husband is one of the big wigs in one of the hotels, and he is the district manager of over 14 hotels covering Hawaii, Bora Bora, and all of California. Their son is going to college in California in September, her husband wants to take on less responsibility, and they feel they can get better health care in Seattle than they can here. I’m not sure that is the case. Hawaii has a bad reputation. I don’t think the locals know what health care is on the mainland. Not only do I not see a difference, Mike and I thought we got the best service here.

      Deb has lived on the island now for fourteen years. She says she will be coming back to visit regularly. She is a lovely warm woman. I have been thinking about that quality in others of late. I have encountered people who are friendly, and outgoing but not warm- by my lights. So what makes someone warm? As I think of it, it has to be that they are fully accepting of themselves. I think it means being in touch with the less pleasant aspects of ourselves, our fear, our anger, our sadness, and finally, our capacity for causing injury to others, as well as the best, most loving aspects of ourselves. My best guess is that the warmest people are those who understand they can harm others, are vigilant against it, and are self-forgiving for this flaw. The flaw is not an individual failure. It is a problem for all human beings. All religions address the issue of our dark side one way or another. My uncle told me the family motto was “Don’t call lack of opportunity virtue.” Some say, “If I had been there, I would never have . . . . .” But they are untested. Such a person is more in danger of doing precisely what they say they would never do because they won’t recognize the impulse and the seductive forces when the opportunity arrives. 

     I had K’s crew this morning. E. was making the least progress now. It was hard on her. I told her she just had to keep her eyes on the screen. I wouldn’t ask her to answer anything. I would just model. I continued working with the word family -at, changing the initial letter/sound, bat, cat, etc. I said the sounds and waited a brief period. Then I blended the sounds, using cross-body blending, giving her a chance to come up with the answer in her mind without having to say what it was. I planned to continue this until she was comfortable beating me to the punch. 

     I had third grade K first. I asked him if he wanted to write the letters or say them forward and backward. He rattled off his first name with eight letters. He did well with his last name. While it has only four letters, he couldn’t do it with the same ease he had done with his first. We continued working on writing the sentence, “The fox jumps over the dog.” The whole sentence is, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” This sentence includes all the letters in the alphabet. He didn’t want to write today. I just reviewed the sizing and placement of the letters relative to each other. I introduced the j and the p today. It was time to work on the vertical placement of all the letters, classifying them as uppies, downies or regulars.

     E. knocked my socks off today. She quickly identified n without any cueing from me. It was a letter she had struggled with last week. I introduced her mother’s and her older sister’s names. She rattled off the letters in those names except for one. I decided to check her on the whole alphabet. I wrote out each letter. She was able to identify all except for six quickly.  

     I called her mom after the session. Had she been able to do this before and only got stuck on the letter n? No. This is all new. I presume that the work we did on Friday when I had her look at the movement in her brain did the trick. I never got to do the spin release with her. However, I did use the word spin release. I have seen this before. Once I introduce the idea of the spin release to students, they make changes on their own. Sometimes, that’s the best. 

     I went to Julia’s zoom office hours today, screaming about the BookNook app. Today, we were able to show me how to get back to the reading selection we were working on last time. It was a big deal. The woman from the company who made the original presentation probably showed us what to do, but I didn’t remember.

     When I had adolescent D today, I pointed out that he had an easier time remembering whole words than the patterns. I don’t know how often I went over the sound of -er, cueing it with the word her, or how many times I covered the most common sound of ea, the long e sound. Nothing stuck. I said it seemed he had an easier time remembering words when meaning was involved. That signals right-brain dominance. He agreed.

     Today, I followed up on the BrainManagementSkills I had started yesterday. Adolescent D said there was a bright red color on the left side and white on the right. He said the red on the left was pretty. I said that was good because it meant he was comfortable with it. I didn’t do anything else with the images. I always wait until something feels right to me. Today, he remembered ea as long /e/ and the rule for pronouncing the c as either the /k/or the /s/. He enjoyed figuring out the sounds. We worked on a list of alphabetized words from a third-grade passage. However, he says he is still not looking for patterns as he reads. 

When I started working with adolescent D, I allowed him to select the material I used: a book on 3rd grade, 5th grade, a book with Hawaiian Pigeon, or a book on philosophy. He chose the philosophy book. This warned me that I would have to deal with his ego. I started with the philosophy book. For our regular work, I began with fourth-grade material. Then I switched to seventh-grade material. When he mastered a seventh-grade passage, he started to relax. He learned he could learn. Then I could work with material that might suit his learning needs.  

I went through several words on the third-grade list with adolescent D. He was able to identify ‘the pattern’ in each syllable. I led him through an exercise where he changed the initial sound for each word. We ran over time. I told him I had had fun. He said he did too. Wow! This is great. 

At 3:30, 6:30 pm California time, I worked with J. We could get back Tamitha and the Troll. It introduced some new vocabulary words. I reviewed each sentence carefully, ensuring he understood the language at that level. The question at the end was, why was the troll disappointed. J. said the troll didn’t like the object Tamitha brought her even though it was what she had asked for. I had to make a comparison to his own life.

 

His mother promised me homemade tamales if her son didn’t learn to read. He learned to read. I didn’t get the tamales. Why was I disappointed? ( I know it sounds backward, but it worked.)

 

    The troll asked Tamitha to fulfill impossible challenges. If she failed, she would turn her into an animal from Australia. Tamitha fulfilled the challenges. Therefore, the troll couldn’t turn her into an animal from Australia. The troll was disappointed. He got it.

      I was exhausted. Naps didn’t help. Yesterday, I was full of energy all day. What was going on? I didn’t figure it out till the end of the day. I had been procrastinating. That is the most exhausting activity I know.  

    Friday, my tech was coming over. The plan was to work on the final copy of my video introducing my approach to teaching reading. The other day I compared my presentation between 7 versions of the video slide by slide. There were several that I decided to redo. I had to review those redone slides to see if they were satisfactory. It was this I was putting off. I finally started on the task in the late afternoon. As usual, it was easy and fun to do. I only completed about five of the 22 before switching to watching the Netflix series Manifest. 

     While watching the show, I felt pulled to continue the work on my video. This time I listened to the call. I completed the task so I would have nothing to do the next day. Rather than feeling exhausted, I was full of energy. Before, I had been yearning for bed and sleep; now, it was the last thing on my mind. When I went to bed, I had trouble falling asleep.