Friday, December 30, 2022

 Friday, December 30, 2022

   I woke up at 5 before my alarm went off and started my in-bed exercises. I got up at 7 am without having completed all of them. I was in a hurry because I had an 8 am appointment with ninth-grade K. I expected him to miss the session. What adolescent gets up by 8 am when they don’t have to?

   Surprise! He signed up on time. I asked him if he knew what character development was. I had to pull it out of him. After a minute’s thought, the first thing he said was, “I don’t know.“ I asked him if he envisioned something. Yes, I pulled this out of him. He had a vision of the story of a girl whose mother died, and she had to step in as the caretaker of her younger siblings. What was the change in character? He had no idea. He is not a deep thinker.  

     I talked about character development in relation to him. The school is asking how we can help him to become more independent in his work. I spoke of becoming more self-sufficient as Brian was in Hatchet. K thought he could have done what Brian had done if he had been in that situation. Could he have made a bow and arrow as Brian did? He said yes. I see him as out of touch with reality. I don’t know if this is a lack of experience, immaturity, or a cognitive problem. I work with six-year-olds with more depth.  

   I asked him if he was a person who tried to solve problems on his own or as others to do it. Whenever he said, “I don’t know,” he asked someone else to do the work. He has to choose: will I ask someone else to do the work, or will I try to do it myself? Being the other extreme, never asking for help is also not good. We need to be balanced. His teachers talked about helping him to become more independent. This is what I was hired to do. This may have been the first time he looked at his behavior critically. If his character developed, he would change from a dependent character to a more independent one.

   I had Mama K’s crew right afterward. I started with fourth grade K.  I covered all the math standards he hadn’t met. Today, I discussed sequencing in narratives. He listed the things he did in preparation for going to bed in their order of occurrence. I numbered them one through six. Next, I moved the events around so that drying himself preceded showering. “I dried myself after showering.”  He found the conflict in the sequence of presentation versus the temporal order of occurrence confusing. Why would you do such a thing?  

  I list the birth order of the children in his family by the order of occurrence. Then I wrote, “Fourth grade K was born before the twins and after his two older siblings.” He didn’t understand why I would do that. I was emphasizing information about fourth-grade K.  He said he understood. We’ll see.

  I continued working on automatic recall with Twin E. I used sixth-grade material today, underlining the words I wanted her to recall. Wow! There had been an improvement since we started. The difference was so great that I decided to do the same thing with Twin A. She could name the words I underlined, but Twin E was slower. I will have to continue with this with both of them. They both have serious memory problems.

  At nine-thirty, I had second-grade M. I couldn’t remember if I had done addition with regrouping with her or if I was confusing her with fourth-grade K. (I checked my notes. I had worked on it with her. She can do an exercise one minute, which looks completely unfamiliar two days later. 

Memory was a problem for her in first grade. The school and her parents chose to retain her because of it.

   After getting some steps in on a short walk, I went down for a nap. I woke up remembering I had agreed to meet with Jana at noon. It was ten after. I hadn’t even set the alarm. I called her instead of Zooming with her. Jana is interested in my teaching methods. I talked about the work I did with Adolescent D on his discomfort around his disability. Thinking about it induces feelings of shame. I talked about my theory of the function of shame.

   Shame warns us of social dangers, as pain warns us of physical injury. Humans are social animals. Our brains were developed when we were only a few members of our species wandering the savanna in search of food and shelter. Our groups were still small, and survival was the goal. When survival is the goal, alignment of purpose and behavior is vital. Conformity is expected of everyone. When someone can’t or won’t conform, the options are limited: exile or death. Exile pretty much equaled death. If children couldn’t conform, they had to be left to die. Accommodating people with disabilities is a luxury of abundance- and it is a luxury. We are so lucky to have enough to share our wealth with others.

   Children who cannot learn at the same rate as their classmates feel the sting of shame. I realized that shame reminds us that our lives might be at stake. I have a protocol for relieving that fear with most children. I point to the front of their heads, the prefrontal lobe, and say, “I’m going to ask you a silly question. (Hopefully, it’s silly.) Do you think anyone will kill you if you never learn to read?”  So far, so good; all children have smiled at the ridiculousness of that question. Then I tell them, “See a little you, sitting in your head (right under the fontanelle). Ensure ‘the little you’ faces the back of your head. Now, tell every cell in your brain back there that no one is going to kill you even if you never learn to read.”  I have been doing this exercise with children for over twenty years. So far, without fail, children report feeling more relaxed after doing it. The alertness to societal expectations is built in. It is so far from what our lives are now; it is hard to imagine that such thoughts take up space in our minds. But they do, not in our conscious minds, but in our unconscious minds.

   This concern for difference slipped out of our conscious minds at least 3, 000 years ago. Why? Because two religions I know of, there may be many more, addressed this anxiety big time, Buddhism 2,500 years ago and Christianity 2000 years ago. Other religions address threats from sources from outside the tribe. The two more recent religions address threats inside the tribe caused by personal differences. These religions offer more than just that. But, interestingly, the salvific religions developed around the same time. In human history, five hundred years is a mere blip.

    I spent most of the afternoon printing out the receipts from my charitable contributions. I did it all through Charity Navigator. I was swayed by their ratings to not give to some of the charities I had in the past. Instead, I looked for a comparable charity that had a better rating. Now, I worry if those ratings are bought and paid for. 

We live in an uncertain world. I don’t like it.

   I told Judy about the graffiti I saw in the library parking lot last week when I went to church. “Kill all white men.”  Judy said I should call the police. They would take care of it. Being from NYC, that never occurred to me. Graffiti is everywhere. Of course, this was one promoting violence. I planned to check it when I went to church the following Sunday. However, I thought someone from the library must have taken care of it.

   Judy also told me a story of her sister-in-law’s encounter with some evangelicals. They tried to convert her. When she said she was Jewish, things turned ugly. A Mexican man came up to protect her. He told her to leave. She didn’t want to because she was afraid of what the police would do to him. 

Apparently, she had managed to press a button on her phone that called the police. They could hear what was going on and sent a patrol car. The Evangelicals ran away when they heard the sirens. The rise in anti-Semitism is alarming. I am so glad Mike is dead, and he doesn’t have to even hear what has been happening in our country and the world.