Tuesday, January 3, 2023

 Tuesday, January 3, 2023

      Today was a fully booked day. I had eight tutoring sessions scheduled, plus a chiropractic appointment. I woke up around 2 am and dozed on and off for the rest of the night. I was on the road for my morning walk with Elsa by six-forty-five. 

   My first session was at nine am with Mama K’s crew. I only had the Twins. Fourth-grade K wasn’t home. He had gone somewhere with his father. I did the same thing with the girls I had been doing. I think there has been some improvement since the beginning of the winter break. I am sure there is with Twin A. She recalls words she couldn’t before. However, we still haven’t made it through a primer-level story. 

     At ten am, I had second-grade M.  We have been working on math since I discovered she couldn’t read three-digit numbers correctly. Yesterday, we reviewed many of the concepts in the second-grade core math standards. She demonstrated competency with ease. Then we hit addition with regrouping. On, boy. Everything we had gone over went right out the window. 

 Today I worked on two-digit addition problems with regrouping. When M saw the four-digit sum, she couldn’t read the number. She had no idea what to do. When I isolated the number 5,642, she had no problem reading it and representing it with expanded notation (5000+600+40+2). Why did she have a problem representing the number 42 with expanded notation? The best I could make out, she became confused when she saw something in an unfamiliar context. Everything had to be presented discreetly.  

  I figured she was traumatized because she had to repeat first grade. I said something about it. She said she had to repeat it because of Covid. Her mom told me she had to repeat first grade because of her poor memory. Ow! I dropped the topic. Well, not quite. I asked her if other classmates of hers from first grade had to repeat it too. She revealed she had moved to a new school. She didn’t know if the other kids in her class had also repeated first grade. However, she did realize her best friend was in first grade for the first time. Oh, boy. Something is going on that has nothing to do with memory. This is the third child I see as mentally closed off- literally close-minded—someone who has difficulty taking in something new. As I conceived it with fourth-grade K the other day, he was enclosed in a bubble that didn’t allow any intrusion. 

   I got around to pouring boiling water on the sprouting sucker limbs on the base of the twenty-foot haole koa I reduced to a stump.   While the boiling water trick was successful with the smaller tree, would it also work to kill a much larger tree with its much deeper roots? Maybe, if I keep pouring boiling water on it for a year whenever I see more sprouting. We’ll see, won’t we?

  I planned to leave early for my noon chiropractic appointment. Just as I was walking out the door, I got a text from Lisa, saying she’d been there at twelve fifteen rather than twelve. That was okay with me—the chore I had planned before the appointment might take longer anyway.

   Yesterday, I learned the cement paint I was considering using wouldn’t last more than eight years in Hawaii. The guy at the paint counter was downright rude when I said I needed something that would last at least forty years. He said you’ll have to go to another store for that. While he was rude, he was also correct.

   When I got home, I looked up cement stains. There is a product that stains cement, acid cement stains. I called a company in Utah that carries it. The technical advisor wasn’t thrilled to have to deal with me. He usually dealt with professionals, not little old ladies with zero product knowledge. I learned that the cement had to be ‘thirsty’ to take the stain. Thirsty means it had to absorb water, not allow it to pool on the surface. Paint wouldn’t adhere to cement unless the ‘pores’ were open. I had to deal with a distributor of the product. There were three listed on their site. Lowes and Home Depot were two, and possibly Sherwin Williams. I checked Lowes. Never heard of it. I stopped off at Ace Hardware. They’re always worth a try. They had oil-based stains designed for wood, not cement. When I got home, I checked the site distributors. There isn’t one in Hawaii. Now what?

  I arrived at my chiropractic appointment at 12:15 on the nose. The office was locked. I went to sit in this open-air atrium with a lovely breeze blowing through to read my Kindle until Lisa arrived. She texted me at twelve forty-five to say she was in. She wanted to show me the new floor her husband had laid over the weekend. She was prepared to go into great detail when I asked if we couldn’t get started. Lisa does good to great work. I see a difference, but she yaks about her private life in more detail than I do in the updates I write. It’s non-stop chatter about life’s little challenges. I usually like to listen to people’s stories. Something about hers doesn’t sit quite right with me.

   I had texted Adolescent D and his mom, saying I might be late. When I got home at 2:30, half an hour late, I signed in immediately. I asked him if he wanted to continue working on the knot in his stomach. The other day he asked me if I was a therapist. I told him no, but people have told me I had a gift for it since I was young. We continued working on his hatred of his hatred of his hatred of the knot. I don’t push to the central issue. Too scary, which promotes resistance instead of curiosity.

   At 3:30, I had my session with the J & Iz siblings. I started with third grade J. He continued arguing with me about the value of our work. His objection is he doesn’t want to talk about his anger. I asked him if his anger was any better after our sessions. We only had two so far. I couldn’t do the work until the second session. J acknowledged yes; it was a bit better. I asked if anything else had worked. No, but that made no difference. He wasn’t ‘better,’ which means perfect. I compared learning this skill with learning to surf. After the first three lessons, would you argue they didn’t work because you weren’t as good as your dad, who’s a wonderful surfer with years of experience? He seemed to calm. I was yelling- not so much at him as to him to get him to hear me. He said very calmly. Don’t yell at me. There was no anger. Wow! I stopped yelling. He was in the right and had the right. Delightful!

    I only worked with first-grade Iz for fifteen minutes. I had her read another passage on a high second-grade level. She was a piece of cake.   I called her mom afterward to explain I just did fifteen minutes with her daughter. She didn’t need more than that. Mom told me she had her read something to her before the class. This was the first chance she had to listen to her read. She was impressed with the improvement. She could see that she no longer relied on memory exclusively. She could figure things out. 

   I asked mom to tell the teachers about my method. When we spoke, she said something about saying something to both children’s teachers. I called her back. I advised her against saying anything to fourth-grade J’s teacher. I’m working with him specifically on his anger issue. Mom had taken him to a certified child psychologist to no effect. I advised mom against telling his teacher about me. I am not licensed in anything to do with psychology. I’m just good at what I do. If she told the school she was taking her son to an unlicensed practitioner, we’d have child protective services down our necks. I want her to tell people about my teaching methods, not my healing ones. Those we’ll keep under wrap.

   I had a 4:30 with ninth-grade K. His mom texted me; he didn’t want to do it. I’m ready to throw in the towel. He needs more than I can give him or something other than I can give him. I’ve seen evidence that he has the necessary basic intelligence. He is not a deep thinker about anything. He is one of the shallowest people I’ve ever dealt with, and that’s saying a lot. I have worked with the cognitively impaired, the autistic, and one person with schizophrenia. K is in a class by himself. Is he just locked in, or does he lack the basic capacity to do better work? Everything must be pulled out of him. No wonder he hates working with me. Maybe someone who has a structured program he can follow would be better for him.