Tuesday, February 8, 2022

 Tuesday, February 8, 2022

   I had a restless night's sleep. I slept lightly through the night, wrestling with the attitude of adolescent D's teachers. I was concerned their hostile attitude toward D reflected their feelings toward me.  

       His mother asked his teachers to contact me at the beginning of the school year. One teacher, his English and Social Studies teacher, didn't call until right before Christmas vacation. We had a good talk. She had been asking nothing of him up to this point because she understood he couldn't read and his self-image was damaged. She planned to ask him to do something in the coming semester.  

       I called her back the next day, leaving a voice mail, expressing excitement. I had a few ideas. She never called me back again. Reflecting on her response, I have concluded she interpreted my excitement as pushy. I can appreciate that. I had a friend push ideas on me that she found exciting. I felt overwhelmed. I asked her to stop. I expect others to do that. This woman didn't get that there was no way I'd expect someone to do what I recommended. I' expect them to tell me what they respond to and what they don't respond to. That way, I can modify my recommendation. I love making those changes in my thinking. I find it creatively satisfying. I love doing it. I also don't do well when someone tells me to use a method. It takes me time to adjust. I expect everyone else to be the same way. If my approach to reading were ever accepted in the schools, I would oppose teachers being forced to adopt it. That's crazy-making. 

   On the other hand, after I don't know how many years, I finally got the point of the 'modern math approach.' It didn't hurt that I read that most people never successfully memorize multiplication tables in one of my neuroscience books. If they are going to function mathematically, they need another approach. Is our objective creating an intellectual elite, who can memorize, or is it making as many people as possible functional?

   However, in the case of adolescent D's teacher, there is another possibility; she is just a total incompetent. She didn't know he had serious memory problems. There is no way he could have memorized his whole talk. Also, she said she and another teacher were working on his executive functioning. I asked her what she was doing. No answer. First place, executive functioning is the new, flashy name for study skills. My best guess is they give him the list of executive function skills and say, "Do this! Complete this homework!" but give him no support. They're not scaffolding his learning because they have no idea what they're doing.   I did ask. I hoped to support them in their efforts. But she never got back to me.

      I'd been thinking more about my social interaction style. I remember Shelly saying that families function either independently or enmeshed.   Those don't seem like antonyms to me. The antonym of enmeshed is avoidant. In the enmeshed family, everyone has to do what everyone does. Everyone is in everyone else's business, but not in a good way.  

   In an avoidant family, people avoid each other. Both enmeshed and avoidant are toxic. What does a healthy family look like? They can't be all exactly the same.

    The healthy perimeters are independent on one end and engaged on the other. From what I have observed, people on the independent end barely talk to each other and rarely do things together. Yes, there is a healthy version of that. I have observed it. Two people had tough childhoods but felt they could deeply trust each other. In creating a base for each other, they help each other flourish. They create a foundation for each other to make change possible. There meet on some plane. For couples, it could be sexual. That would be enough. They have to have some way to deal with the negatives other than denial and avoidance. Eventually, the relationship backfires.

  On the other end, but still short of toxic enmeshment, you have people who do everything together. Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme are an example of this, married parents of two children who worked together in a business that required constant interaction and remained happy with each other for 55 years until Eydie's death. 

    Any healthy relationship has to have a range of possible ways to interact. If it's stuck at a narrow level, constantly engaging, or always separate, I can't see how it can be healthy. It can't all be one or the other. The difference would be in how much of one relationship style versus another.   

      On my morning walk, my right foot didn't hurt at all. I have been pushing my left hip to the left as I walk. Katie told me not to do that but to keep my hips even. Problem: They're not aligned correctly in the first place. My weight is distributed too far to my right leg to start with. I have to thrust my hip to the left to even out my weight distribution. When I do that, the pain in the metatarsals of the right foot disappears.

    Darby had called last night to tell me she would leave a tangelo for me. She leaves fruit for me on the rocks holding her mailbox in place. I made sure to walk that far to collect it. There was nothing there. I have never had that problem before. I thought she had forgotten to put it out last night.

    I walked past her house again in the late morning. Furthermore, there was nothing there. I got worried. I called her house phone and left a message, warning that I would be banging on their door if no one showed up. Darby came up the driveway. She heard my voice but didn't hear what I said. It assured me she and Patrick were okay. She had put out the fruit at 5:30. Someone else must have taken it. This was a first. No one has ever taken the limes she puts out for me. This makes it clear there isn't much demand for limes-but that juicy tangelo. She said she had given me their best one. It was soft and juicy. She returned to the house and came out with two more for me. 

    I had PT with Terry this afternoon. She worked on the muscles of my left leg. In the end, she said my left leg was straight. She was stunned. She didn't think that would be possible. Now, we had to work on my right leg. The problem is more with my back than either of my legs. She checked my spine. "You poor thing. You're a twisted sister." That I am, I contemplated THR. Terry thought as I have, I need to clear up my spinal curvature before I have THR. 

   As I left, Terry opened a brown shopping bag sitting on her desk and offered me some tangerines. A client had brought them in. We all have problems getting rid of our access produce. I have two mango trees on my property. They produce several hundred every season. If I don't distribute them wherever I can, they fall to the ground and rot.   I said I would take the whole bag. She doled out four to me and then changed her mind. She kept four for herself and gave me the rest of the bag.

    I had an appointment with adolescent D later in the afternoon. I asked him about his presentation. Yes, he felt it went well. Did he feel like it took a lot of courage? No, it was just ordinary. That could be good with another student, but because he's a passive floater, I wish he had felt some excitement, some realization that he was doing something he had never dared to do before. There could be an advantage to his lack of self-awareness and memory problems. He can't remember who he was. He lives in the moment. He could read his presentation, so he did—period end of sentence.  

    I complimented him for his accomplishment. Then we continued working with Phase III of The Phonics Discovery System. Because he had done better on the sight word list, reading words on a third-grade level, I switched to the material on that level instead of the 2nd-grade level. He did reasonably well. There were words he misread. There was one sentence he rendered meaningless. That was a concern. When he reread it and got it right, he said he knew it was wrong. Then he missed the word is. Yes, he couldn't remember it for love nor money. He had to decode it. Why does this happen? Is there anything I can do about it? I hope so.

    I watched the first half of Patsy and Loretta, about Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn. It's a made-for-television movie. It's decent. Anything that doesn't stress me out of my mind or annoy me with its silliness is okay. There just has to be something good about it.