Thursday, October 6, 2022

Thursday, October 6, 2022

I slept exceptionally well. I went to bed early because we had 7 a.m. yoga. I slept through till the alarm went off. My ankle was still bothering me, so I limited my walk.

   Today's yoga was dedicated to the celebration of Jared's birthday. Jared was just forty and was found dead by his husband one morning. No one knows what he died of. Suicide is one thought; another is an accidental overdose. We will never know. His family doesn't want the results of his autopsy to be public. Unfortunately, Jared was a very public figure who knew many people. There is speculation, some of it pretty ugly. They would be better off putting the truth out there. If people don't get explanations from a reliable source, they make up one on their own.

     Scott had told me Yvette had planned vodka jell shots for everyone and some marijuana cigarettes. When I came out to the driveway, there were paper-mâché strips across the driveway with attached balloons.   

      I was surprised when Yvette didn't follow the usual sequence of asanas. I was even more surprised when she ended the class early. Scott hadn't warned me about this. I didn't partake in the jell shots. I ate one of the from-scratch cupcakes Elise had made. It was delicious. Scott took videos and photos with my phone, and I took more later. After class, I needed a three-hour nap, partially due to the high sugar load.

 At noon, I had an acupuncture session. We had a maddening discussion on a topic she introduced. It took the full hour for me to understand her point. She said the following: Language interferes with the flow state. The flow state is the ideal state. We should always function in that state. Some languages interfere with it more than others. We don't use language when we are in flow; we use pictures. She believes thinking outside the box is better than thinking inside the box. She also thinks a single solution will get people to think outside the box. None of which I agree with six ways from Sunday. While the flow state feels great, if we are going to learn something new, we have to abandon it for a time. While language interferes with the flow state, anyone up for a world without a spoken language. Sorry, we're humans. We have to work with what we have.

  I asked adolescent D if he would do an additional session yesterday. He texted me to schedule another one for today. I started working with WbyW on the material assigned by his school. First, he read the passage. He did an excellent job. His reading flowed flawlessly until he hit a word he couldn't recognize. He couldn't decode it for love nor money. I have gone over and over this process with him. Whenever he hits a word he doesn't know, he is brought to his knees. He is stuck and has no way to get himself unstuck. For him, it's automatic, or it just doesn't happen.

  Since I wanted to use the material to improve his language comprehension skills, I didn't push the decoding. I used the material one of his teachers assigned and applied the WbyW approach, asking detailed questions about each sentence. He did reasonably well, except he couldn't confine his answers to the information in the sentence, an understandable problem since it is not what students are normally asked to do.

   I lay down for a nap after that session. Jean, my friend from Arizona, called as I was waking Perfect timing. I went out for a walk while we compared notes about our lives.

  I had my final session with ninth-grade K at 4:30 p.m. I used the same material and comprehension activity with him that I had used with adolescent D. They were in the same grade. Oh, boy. It was much more difficult than I thought it would be. I had done some of it with adolescent D.  He did very well, considering it was our first session, and I was asking him to do something he had never done before. I ask students to answer many questions about the same sentence. There are four categories of questions: In the Book, Think & Search, The Author & Me, and Beyond the text. Some other teachers created these categories, and I use them differently. They used these questions to discuss whole passages or texts. I use them to understand how language works. I use them instead of the old sentence diagramming trees from my youth. K found this task overwhelming. Now, D had read the whole passage and had more of a sense of what it was about. I will have to start on a lower level with ninth-grade K.

   I had a session with Jana, a tutor from Step Up Tutoring, who asked if I would teach her my method. I told her how I was using Starfall, a free teaching site, with some of the kids. She saw how she could use this with some of her kids.

  I continued to watch the Netflix TV series  Family Secrets. It's both engaging and annoying. It centers on a wedding day with lots of back flashes. It reminds me of a Robbe-Grillet book I had to read twenty years ago. It has you jumping back and forth between scenes, and you have to sort it out. The series is a comedy, but with many vile people who are not so funny.