Monday, December 26, 2022

 Monday, December 26, 2022 

    I have been listening to YouTube Talks on Buddhism. I started with talks by Stephen Batchelor, whose books I love. YouTube was so kind as to let me know about other speakers on the subject. I listened to a talk that came out of the Harvard Divinity School. The speaker made several interesting points. He says Buddhism is less concerned with social justice than the Abrahamic religions. I could argue that it is not the core issue in Christianity. There are Christians who would agree with me. The speaker did not argue against the importance of social justice; he just said it wasn't a central concern of Buddhism. The focus is elsewhere.

  He argued the central issue of Buddhism is dukkha, the suffering caused by birth, illness, old age, and death. However, the speaker put a slightly different spin on the idea of dukkha. Dissatisfaction with anything is the cause of dukkha. Anything can include the way your steak turned out. That's how I've heard it described by S.N. Goenka. He repeatedly says that we all have to deal with things happening we don't want and not getting what we want. Disappointment.

  Neuroscientists now back the idea that dissatisfaction is the default mode of the human mind. If everything is going well, who cares. If something is going badly, that grabs our attention. Scientists point to primitive man's survival needs when our brains were formed. There was nothing to report if we didn't run into a tiger or a snake. If we had a narrow escape, that was a story worth discussing. If someone died in the encounter, it was worth long cautionary lectures, reminding one and all what not to do. Those talks and experiences should be burned into our brains and rehearsed regularly so we don't fall into a similar trap.  

   If dukkha is dissatisfaction, the opposite is gratitude. In gratitude, we remember all the moments that went right and the outcomes in our favor that made us happy. We have to choose to remember them. They don't come to us naturally.

   He talked about how other institutions address the universal human sense of lack. Christianity says the problem is sin. Modern America says it's a lack of money, fame, or power. Every social institution addresses this aspect of the human condition.

   Second grade M's father canceled her tutoring session because she had a basketball tournament at 9 am. I had Mama K's crew.

I continued working on the math objectives with fourth-grade K. His iReady Math evaluation showed he was still on a first-grade level with math operations. We did some work on addition and subtraction with regrouping. I can understand why he tests at a first-grade level. He cannot consistently add or subtract correctly, even without regrouping. He follows directions but does not see the pattern involved. He says he finds learning in class confusing. I believe that. K is a bright child. This is an interesting puzzle to be solved.

      K did a good job rounding numbers. I wrote a three-digit number and asked him to round to the nearest 100 and then the nearest 10. However, he was back to square one regarding addition and subtraction with regrouping. He 'borrowed' from the number in the tens column when adding two two-digit numbers. Oh, dear. I had trouble figuring out how to get the concept through to him. He didn't understand it mathematically. I created a story.  

   His mom is at a store and wants to buy something that costs $6. She has two dollars. She looks at you and asks for four more. You have it and give it to her. When adding, you are standing south of her. In subtraction, your mom has $5 on her and wants to buy something that costs $8. You are standing west of her. All you have on you is a ten-dollar bill. That's all you can ever give her.

    Next, I had Twin E. I continued working on automatic recall. I used my updates file for this exercise. She couldn't read it. I had no worries about revealing anything. I pointed to those words I thought she might be familiar enough to recall automatically. She is still struggling on a pre-primer level.

    While I have seen progress in her ability to recall automatically, it is hard to convince her not to try to decode a word when she's unsure. Twin E surfs. I pointed out that she uses different skills and muscles when paddling out to the wave than when she rides the wave in. Both are necessary skills if she is going to surf. She has to concentrate on each one separately. She can't work on standing on the board when she is paddling out. While she might do some paddling to catch the wave in, she won't continue that once she's caught the wave. Then, she has to concentrate on a different skill.

   The skill involved in conscious decoding differs from that in automatic recall. The two skills involve different parts of the brain, just as paddling out involves other parts of the body than riding the wave. E struggled but did reasonably well.

    I worked with graded QRI testing material with Twin A. She still struggles on a pre-primer level.