Tuesday, August 10, 2021

Tuesday, August 10, 2021

 

     Today I passed a milestone. I passed 7,000 visits on my blog posted on Blogger.com. Many are repeats; I have some people who visit daily. I have some from the USA and some from China and Russia. Every once in a while, there will be a surge. A teacher in a foreign country, like Turkey, probably assigns my blog to their English class.

      The public blog is different from my updates. I started the updates when Mike was in the hospital. I got sick and tired of having to repeat myself. I had a mailing list of over fifty people. This post is part of the current updates. The blog posts are a year behind. Today I posted the entry for August 12, 2020, on blogger.com. 

     Periodically I speak to someone, and I learn they are still people who read my updates. God bless you, everyone. Thank you for your interest, and thank you for not insisting that I remove your name from the mailing list. You provide me with an excuse to continue writing them. Without this activity, my life would be emptier than it is. I strongly recommend this activity to anyone in my position. It fills the day and makes it feel full as I record all the details.  

      An additional value of the updates is that I get to detail my teaching methods. I think I’m on to something. This way, I get the information out there. Of course, the information gets lost in the swamp of all the other details of my life. It’s the best I can do for now. 

     There were only two students for driveway yoga this morning, Deb and me. Scott was wrestling with car problems, and Joe was taking the week off. Deb will be moving to Seattle soon, within a few weeks. She and her husband have chosen to retire there. She says she’ll be back to visit. 

       I have been feeling lonely, which makes me sad. Self-awareness has its upside; its downside is being sensitive to every feeling, good and bad. Buddhism teaches there are two wings to a peaceful mind with a loving heart: awareness and equanimity. Me, I had self-awareness pushed on me at a young age without attention to equanimity. Equanimity is looking at things with a calm, nonjudgmental mind. You just observe. You just observe something pleasant, and you just observe something unpleasant. You can experience deep joy and sorrow, but don’t cling to them. The clinging gets us in trouble, according to the Buddha.  

    I had a tutoring session with A. We slogged through the reading. This poor kid hates to do anything with the reading. Mind, he is always polite and respectful of me. He always pays attention. He just hates every single minute of it. Every minute reminds him he’s not normal. He can’t see it as a problem to be solved. I want to say all kids feel this way, but it isn’t all. The third grade D, now going into fifth grade, seemed not to care. But A’s position is extreme, especially for someone so young. His pain is alive and well and very present. 

    We went through the sight word list. A rocked the first three lists as he had for several sessions. He ran into trouble distinguishing very from every. I had him compare the letters in the two words. Every starts with an e, etc. Then I asked him for the starting sound of very. He gave me the short /e/. OMG! I have to go back to the drawing board. I have not followed my own advice. 

      I teach there are two phases to teaching decoding. In Phase I, you start with the sound of the word, whether the student can read the word or not. (Students can teach themselves phonics by observing the patterns in words they already know.) Then I ask, “What are the sounds in this word?” Basic phonemic awareness is considered the single biggest predictor of reading success. The last step of Phase I is determining which letter(s) represent those sounds. That is where I started with A, using the Carpenter material. I switched to Phase II a while ago without going back and forth, back and forth. This kid has zero phonemic awareness. I would say I have done him a terrible disservice, except he has made impressive progress. His mother is thrilled with how much he’s made. I am going to have to forgive myself and assume that I followed my instincts, which generally prove to be the best course of action.  

   With adolescent D, I started with 7th-grade material. That’s what he needed. Now, I’m working with first-grade-level sentences. I couldn’t have started there with him. I would have lost him to his wounded ego. Now, he trusts me. He has learned he can learn. Now that he has hope, we can be more flexible, and he is making even greater improvement- very exciting.

I am looking forward to starting again with Phase I with A. Will he be able to invest in the activity? The more he invests, the faster it will go.  

     Judy stopped by to visit after making a Turo drop-off for our next-door neighbor. We talked about bowel movements. We were talking about things that give us satisfaction. I get more unadulterated delight from washing my kitchen floor than from the teaching or even the methods I have developed. Note: I said unadulterated. Dealing with the impact of and the response to my teaching and my teaching methods is more complicated. I compared certain experiences of satisfaction with having a good bowel movement; they’re simple, straightforward, and unambiguous. Judy understood completely. She is from a German family too.

     Besides regular discussions on the value of a good poop as a measure of general health in my family when I was a child, I have one memory. I must have been between three or four. I had been sick.. My image is of my mother examining my poop in the toilet and ecstatically proclaiming it ‘good’; I was healthy again. 

     I was raised thinking talk about body functions was good. Poor Mike, he couldn’t tolerate any discussion of body functions. It was a serious cultural conflict. I would forget his predilection and launch into some reference to body functions over dinner. I stopped when he reminded me. Mike’s denial of the physical life in conversation was so bad that when he died, Damon couldn’t imagine he had left directions as to how he wanted to be buried, whole, or cremated. He had made that decision. Judy and I had a blast bonding on this common ‘interest.”