Tuesday, November 1, 2022`

 Tuesday, November 1, 2022`

   

Patrick, Darby's husband, called in the morning to say her piano tuning gig was canceled, and they were available. Wow! Such lovely people surrounded me.

   Today would have been my mom's one-hundredth birthday. It was hard to understand that she had been gone for twenty years. She was still so vivid for me. She was a difficult personality but so alive, even at the end.

  I was up by 7 am. I called my friend Carol, who will visit over Thanksgiving with her husband and sister-in-law, to discuss food and plans to visit the volcano. She made overnight reservations. I would join them on this outing. I'm not someone who enjoys touring and sightseeing, but I have fond memories of visits to that area. I was there with Jean and John once and with Carol and John at another time. Mike and I loved the Thai restaurant there. The plan is to walk to the active volcano at night. It's a mile-long walk in the dark along a path called Desolation Rd. Doesn't sound good, does it?  

  Carol and John have a Havanese like Elsa. We got Elsa because of their dog, Zoe. Now, Zoe is producing lesions the way Elsa is. Carol washes her dog every other day like a good dog mommy. Not like me.

  My friend Melissa called. We had a long talk about Buddhism. We talked briefly about one of my favorite authors on the subject, Steven Batchelor. John recommended the first book of Batchelor's I read, Buddhism without Belief. In a later book, the author says he found evidence in the original texts that Buddha never intended to establish a religion; he wanted a social revolution. Buddha, like Christ, worked to establish a new world order to create a peaceful world. Good luck! Well, it was worth a try. The religious aspects of Buddhism were added. People associated ethical principles with religion and had problems relating to them outside that context.

  I was supposed to meet with second-grade L on Tuesday when she was with her father. He had taken over the literacy aspect of her homeschooling. L's mom felt he should give time for me to work with L, too. Her father canceled at the last minute. He had forgotten her laptop. I was too tired to argue. She could have used her father's phone or computer.

     I had an appointment with the chiropractor at noon. When I arrived, she was finishing off with another client. That took about half an hour. Then she worked on me for an hour and a half. I could hardly complain about her generosity to another client when I was also a beneficiary. I was there for two hours.

  Scott texted me to say he caught Elsa standing on my ole-lady chair eating my vitamins from a bowl on the end table. How long has this been going on? We saw her sitting at the dining room table, looking for something on the table the other day. Could it have been my vitamins? Scott checked to see which vitamins were dangerous for dogs, and we both kept an eye on her. She was fine except for throwing up her dinner and breakfast the following day,

  I had eighth-grade K later in the day. Today was his fourteenth birthday. I thought he was in ninth grade, but no, he was in eighth. I sang the version of Happy Birthday Mike and I developed together to compensate for his inability to sing. It's a lot of caterwauling, but it's fun and makes others laugh.

  K's teachers were complaining he didn't participate in classroom discussions. In my experience, he is quick to say, "I don't know," about any question you ask. I asked him if he was afraid to speak. He said no. Do you have thoughts in your head and decide not to share, or is your mind blank? He has thoughts. I explained his decision not to speak was driven by fear. He doesn't see it that way because he quiets the fear by keeping his mouth shut and avoiding being wrong. As I remember it, he saw my point. Either way, he agreed to a visualization exercise I use to quell social fears.

  I ask the student to picture 'a little them' in the middle of their heads just under the fontanel, the soft spot. Once I am sure the students know no one would kill them for being wrong (if that is not clear to the conscious mind, this exercise will not work.), I have 'the little them' turn around and face the back of their head. 'The little them' has to announce to every cell in the back of their brain that no one will kill them if they say something wrong. This is a very primitive fear that exists in all of us. If the student feels greater relaxation, the exercise is working. Most people who do it are surprised by the effect. We don't walk around aware of the low, persistent fear we live with daily.

 I had a ten-minute session with adolescent D after that. D had problems blending the sounds of two individual phonemes. I checked with other students. They didn't have the same problem, even over Zoom. They could hear the sounds, identify them, and blend them correctly. D couldn't even hear that I made a sound. I was concerned he had a hearing problem. I told his mom what I was seeing. Then it occurred to me that the problem could be with his computer. I checked if he could hear the sounds over the phone. He could. It must be something with the computer. I asked him to raise the volume. That took care of the problem.

  I started using two-syllable words for the blending exercise. Where D had mastered blending five and six-phoneme words, he couldn't blend three phonemes when working on two-syllable words. Huh? Oh. He couldn't bear to blend sounds that didn't produce a meaningful word. His mind balked. He twisted the sounds to something familiar. Most syllables that are part of multi-syllable words are nonsense. Some teachers argue that it makes no sense to teach nonsense words. The reader has to learn to blend the individual syllables, retain them in working memory, and then blend them. D had to learn to overcome his discomfort with nonsense syllables.