Friday, February 10, 2023

 Friday, February 10, 2023

   I finished over 4,000 steps in my morning walk.

     I called B to see if he knew someone else who did cement staining. He had mentioned a company he worked with in an earlier conversation. I am unhappy with the way the wedges look now. Damon said they looked like marble. The grey is too dark to have that effect. To me, they look like dirty cement. B said the company he dealt with was no longer in business, back to dealing with Damon or accepting the work as finished. He would charge me twice as much to do more work. He is the only game in town.

   I had some excitement with my car this morning. I couldn't get the electric charging plug out of my car. I tried everything I knew and called Kia. While I pushed the number for the service department, I got the parts department. The guy who answered didn't know but would ask in service. He reported that I should unlock the car. Lo and behold, the car was locked. It is never locked, and I mean never. I locked it yesterday in town because I left my computer inside. I must have locked it by accident when I got home. I unlocked the car. Doing that had no effect. I tried turning the car on and off. That had no effect. I called Kia again.

   Again, I got the parts department, but a different guy. He went and checked with service again, came back, and said, "Press the button two times." I assumed he meant the release button. Their response made it clear they think I'm a ditzy female who can't handle the most basic technical problem: unplugging something. I hope they are right.

      Scott tried to get it out. He didn't have any success either. He said he would do some research. I had been so upset by the turn of events it never occurred to me to do some research on my own. I got the manual out. I didn't find anything that looked right.

   I planned to go up to Paulette to get more Kangen water. I assumed I could drive the car with the plug-in if it was unplugged. I would pull the cord through the driver's side window. I already knew the car would turn on. No problem. Then I tried to shift the car out of park; no such luck. It can only be unlocked if it's attached to the charge. It left me with a completely useless car and a service department that wouldn't even treat my problem respectfully. I was upset but remained remarkably calm.

    I called Paulette to say I wasn't coming up to her house. She suggested I check YouTube. I couldn't be the only person who had this problem.

  I had an appointment with my acupuncturist. I asked her to work on the pain in my left shoulder. It was interfering with my sleep. It could be the after-effect of my falling down a flight of stairs when I was thirty-six, resulting in a rotator cuff tear and a jammed shoulder. Or, it could be from the rotator cuff operation twenty-seven years after the fall. Or, it could be from endless rounds of FreeCell or the side effect from the work the acupuncturist and chiropractor did on that muscle that runs from the top of my head down to my little toe along the left side of my spine. Releasing that muscle puts a different demand on my shoulder muscles. I fell asleep on the table. I never heard her leave. I have no idea how long I was there.

  I had an appointment with Adolescent D.  We started the session with letter tracing. He said he saw a difference in his handwriting. He named letters that were better. He said his 'a' was pristine. He texted me copies of something he wrote a while ago and yesterday.

   The best I can figure out from my notes is that we started the letter-tracing activity the second week of January. We met two days a week in January, half an hour each. That's one hour a week for three weeks. We spent about three minutes at the beginning of each session with the tracing activity. In February, we started meeting three times a week. That's two weeks with three half-hour sessions; three minutes three times a week makes a total of nine minutes a week times two weeks, which equals eighteen minutes in February and eighteen minutes in January. The whole thing was something on the order of thirty-six minutes. My notes are less accurate than a researcher's. I am not a researcher; I am a teacher. It could be less than thirty-six minutes or more. Either way, this is the result. D only does a little handwritten work. He types.

We don't know when he changed; we only see when the change manifested. And here it is.     

                                                       

 

 

        This is a stunning degree of change in a short time. What did we do? On Zoom, I selected the broad stroke in the draw function. I slowly wrote the letters on the Zoom whiteboard. Adolescent D followed my actions with the index finger of his writing hand at my pace. That's all we did. And that happened.     

    I  asked him if he understood what his teachers said better. He said he didn't know. I wondered if he felt less annoyed when they talked. Yes. That's a good indication that there's been a change.

   D has been working on his emotional reaction to his disability: anger at himself and self-hatred. He has to rise above the shame he feels because of his inadequacies. Those feelings interfere with his having a good life. When he comes across an unfamiliar word or misreads one, his pain interferes with him working systematically to decode or recall the word. He will only overcome his problem if he works on applying the procedures I've taught him. Suppose he never overcomes his limitations, poor reading, and poor auditory processing skills. In that case, he must learn to tell people he has difficulty and ask for help. He would have to tell people he has a problem and how to help him compensate for it. D has trouble remembering what he has been told to do. He could tell his boss he has this problem, "Please, record your instructions on my phone."

    D told a story of when he told someone he couldn't read and asked for help. He ordered food at Willie's Hot Chicken. He told the server he couldn't read and asked her to read the side orders. For him to have done this is monumental. I asked him about the server. He had already said it was a woman. I asked how old she was. "Old enough to work there." In other words, she was not old enough to be a soft grandmother or a loving mother; she was a young woman his age. Then I asked if she was attractive. Yes. Holy moly! A young man with a problem casually told a young, fertile female he couldn't read. Unbelievable!!!

   Despite my successes, I need help getting new students to work with, even when I offer to do it for free. It is profoundly humiliating. I take heart when I think of how even popular brands advertise like crazy. My second issue is getting people to adopt my work. I can appreciate shifting from the familiar to something new is difficult. But they show no interest. First grade Iz's teacher was blown away by her improvement over a month; actually, only two hours of work. She asked what I did. Iz's mom gave her my contact information. Did the teacher contact me? What do you think?  

   I was reading Time of Magicians about the great philosophers at the beginning of the twentieth century. Wittgenstein and Heidegger had trouble getting people to understand and appreciate their work. Wittgenstein met with Bertrand Russell for three days in a Swiss hotel and tried to get him to understand his work to no avail. Is my work as significant? I don't know. Am I as frustrated? Yep. Those poor guys had it worse than me.