Tuesday, December 20, 2022
I had an appointment with Mama K's crew at 8:30. The plan is to meet every morning at this time over the winter break. They had trouble signing on this morning, so we got a late start. I started with fourth grade K. We continued with rounding. He had difficulty understanding why the line between the numbers was drawn between four and five, with five going to the higher number. He doesn't have words for what is troubling him. Children who have trouble like this are either cognitively deficient or cognitively gifted. I suspect he is in the latter category but not verbal enough to articulate it. I explained that the line had to be drawn between eleven numbers, not ten, and someone said, "Here! Between 4 and 5," and that's why it's there.
We are not dividing 10 digits, but eleven (not 1-10 but 0-10). If we were dividing 10 by 2, we would evenly divide them into two groups of five. Because we are dividing eleven integers into two groups. 0, 2, 3, 4,/ 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, the dividing point here is smack in the middle of 5. Since we must maintain whole numbers, we shove the five over the line. Why? "Because I said so," is the answer. No, it isn't me who said so, but someone did. It is a convention we all accept. Period end of sentence. K accepted that.
The next step was determining what to round the number to:
Given the number 17, what is the nearest 0 number below 17 and the nearest 0 number above 17? Answers: 10 and 20. What is 17 closest to, 10 or 20?
Then, I covered rounding to the nearest 100 and the nearest 1000. The whole lesson took 15 minutes, and K was off and running. Why does someone who can be taught to apply a difficult concept in fifteen minutes have trouble learning it in the first place? What is going on in this child's mind or not going on?
Then I had the Twins briefly. I start with identifying the vowel letters. They have to be learned in order, A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y. They should be learned in that order so they can say them when coming out of deep sleep. I started to cover the short and long vowel charts. I had asked one of them the other day if they had heard of long and short vowels. They said no, but it was clear today they had; they couldn't remember what they were—time to drill them.
I had second grade M at 9:30. I will work with sixth grade W once I get more information from her teacher. Her class hadn't made much progress in the book, Out of the Dust. In my last session with W, she knew what was going on in the book and what similes were versus metaphors.
I worked on math with second-grade M. We had worked on counting by 5s last time. She has to be taught patterns explicitly. Today, we were working on counting by 10s from any number: 17, 27, 37, etc. Not a clue. I did several rounds of 1 +10=, 11+10=, 21+10=, and 31+10=. When I saw she had the pattern and didn't need to add the numbers carefully, I gave her numbers without showing the equation. After adding 10+ a number, I switched to subtracting by ten. That came easily, too.
I switched to the next objective, adding and subtracting numbers up to 100. Oh, dear. She was not attentive to the operation sign. She adds when there is a subtraction sign and vice versa. Our discussion of operation signs led her to mention multiplication. She had no idea. I let her play with it because play leads to learning, and I didn't know how to guide her play without dumping on her.
I sat down for breakfast and read Paulson's first chapter of Hatchet. I loved that book the first time I read it. I selected it for vacation work for ninth grade K. I wasn't disappointed. I loved the first chapter. I can't wait to read the rest of the book.
I picked up the towels from the floor where we put them to soak up the water that flooded the laundry room yesterday with the heavy rain and threw them in the washing machine. We had a full day of storms. We never get weather like that. Well, hardly ever. It wasn't considered a hurricane, just a storm system. Sandor said the wind was at 140 mph on top of Mauna Kea and 70 mph where he lived, at a higher elevation than where we are. That wind ripped off the hinge on his iron gate. We had nothing like that here. Although Judy argues that we had gusts of 60 miles per hour.
The storm started in the middle of the night on Sunday. I heard the rain come down. Wow! I went back to sleep. When I woke, I found the rain had come into the laundry room through the wire door. Scott thought to put towels down. They served two functions: they soaked up the water and made the tile floor less slippery. The towels were dry now with no more threats of rain despite Dean saying a third storm system was on its way.
I was about ready to leave to make my noon appointment with my chiropractor when I got a text saying 12:45 would work better for her. I bathed Elsa. She stood right by my side while I cleaned the sink in preparation. She feels better when I give her a bath. She still shakes while standing in the sink for ten minutes while the medicinal shampoo does its thing on her skin, but she doesn't object. I no longer wrap her in a towel when I'm through. I tuck her under one arm, put her down on the bathroom floor, and open the door. She knows the drill. She runs out and does her thing. My shirt dries off in half an hour.
I left shortly after bathing Elsa. I stopped at Long's first to pick up some Hersey's milk chocolate nuggets with whole almonds. They had none. They had every other variety, and they were all on sale. I've cleared out their stock. I went to the chiropractor.
I was in a sucky mood, angry. Lisa wasn't ready to see me at 12:45. I had Adolescent D at 2:30 and needed to get home promptly. I was concerned and not just a little bit annoyed. She said it would be five more minutes. It was close to that. I set my timer to see. Someone had walked in off the street to make an appointment with her. Would I get out in time?
I did. I got out just at 2 pm. I had half an hour to make it home. I was cutting it a bit close, but I made it. In our last session, I talked to Adolescent D about using his unconscious mind instead of his conscious mind to read. Using the conscious mind is exhausting. It is a mere pimple compared to the size of the unconscious mind. Well, it may be more like a boil than a pimple. But the size difference is still impressive.
I told him about the research on Israeli parole judges. When the judges were tired, cases coming up at the end of the day had zero chance of getting parole. Make sure you get that first appointment in the morning if you want a favorable outcome. Likewise, after reading with reasonable accuracy for fourteen minutes, he missed most of the words in a sentence. He had switched to automatic processing and his old habits. Why isn't his unconscious mind learning this new system, and why isn't it working? I continued pursuing that question. No, his unconscious mind didn't want to learn this other system. Why not? He read turtle as trist and then trust. It neither made sense nor conformed to the letter sequence. He has discomfort with confusion. Well, that's a bummer.
I had sessions with J & I, a third-grade boy and a first-grade girl. The third-grade boy went first. His mother asked me to work with him on his anger. He was currently angry about having to meet with me. He had met with therapists before. He believed there was nothing to be done about his anger. He also said he didn't want to talk about it. We did some general talking but didn't do any actual work. I reminded him that he could set boundaries. No, he couldn't decide not to meet with me. If he did, he had to see another therapist. So it was me or someone else. In our last session, I felt some relaxation on his part when I said his parents were good people even though they fought. I had his mother tell him that I 'knew everything' about the problems in his parents' relationship; they were divorced. I didn't want him to feel he had to protect his parents from my judgment. I called her before I started the session to check if she had told him that. She had. Thank God. I couldn't have worked with him if she hadn't. No way I could have penetrated that need to protect them without revealing information he might not have known. Saying I know everything is ambiguous. None of the participants or observers know everything. I certainly don't, but I know enough to know how bad it had been at times.
We established he wanted to be less angry. I told him what Mike had told me. If something happens you don't like, deal with it without anger. It's a problem to be solved.
He told me how a kid in his class called him weird. That hurts. One of my nieces always called me weird. When Mike and I visited her, she started in on me on the drive home from the airport. Her comments were about my Crocs. I said, "You can call me weird three times a day; that's it." I was calm and just set a limit. She didn't do it again.
I asked him where he felt the anger. He felt it in his hands; they balled up into fists. I instructed him to observe how his hands felt; if the tension spread up his arms, across his upper back, into his lower back? I watched it to see where it went and found it interesting. He did that and found he was more relaxed afterward. I told him I would sit with him and watch. I did. We spent several minutes like that. Then I asked him to see himself with that guy who called him weird. Hear him saying those words; did he feel the same or different? He felt slightly different. This might be an easy fix.
Then I had his sister, first-grade Iz. I discovered she had trouble using context clues, using the other words in the sentence to figure out what a missing word might be. I started using Barnell Loft-prepared materials. I read a sentence and gave her three options for the missing word. She was completely off. In subsequent lessons, she showed improvement. She consistently chose the correct word. Then we progressed when I had her guess what the word might be. She had to make a logical choice; it didn't have to be the same as the book gave. She knocked that out of the park. Today, I switched to having her read higher-level material. The only thing I had readily available was Barnell Loft's third-grade material. I thought I would have to read most of it to her, but no. She had a good sight word vocabulary and had started using decoding strategies after our first session. The first selection in the book is probably at a high second-grade level rather than a third-grade level. When she decoded a word following the rules but did not get the actual pronunciation, she could use context clues to figure out the word. When she ran into trouble, I gave her three choices. This is a child without a learning disability. She just needed to be taught in a meaningful way. If they use the principles of Reading Recovery, she was just given opportunities to read more and has received no explicit instruction.
Mr. Lemus returned for the third time to discuss my irrigation system. Even though Josh had drawn a map of the irrigation system for Scott to present, Lemus still didn't have all the information he needed. He decided he would replace one zone at a time.
I asked him about the nozzles. The ones we have now put out a wide spray. He said they were designed for watering lawns, not beds. He would set it up so the system watered plants, not rocks.
Lemus said he saw snow on Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. We get snow on Mauna Kea every winter. It's our air conditioning system; as the winds blow down the mountain, we have colder weather now than during the summer. The surprise was that Mauna Loa had snow on it, too. That doesn't usually happen.
I finished the last of my 10,000 steps late in the evening. I ran into Steve and Shannon. Steve was the principal of an English-speaking school in South Korea. It hurt to think of these two lovely people being apart that much of the year. Steve said he had just handed in his resignation. He was tired of being separated from Shannon and was in conflict with the board. Steve and Shannon remind me of me and Mike.
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