Tuesday, September 20, 2022

 Tuesday, September 20, 2022

     I saw a wandering duck on one of my midday walks. Ducks are uncommon here. A flock of six live at a house I pass on my walk. While they’re pets, they wander freely. I often see them on the road in front of the house. The duck I saw this morning was a good quarter of a mile from his home. I tried to force him back up the hill. He ducked my efforts. I hadn’t planned on a long walk, but I headed up the hill to speak to the owners. They needed to get out there and rescue their pet before he got hit by a car. There were two cars parked out front and a motorcycle in the garage. While it looked like someone must have been home, no one was. Oh, well. I did what I could. I wound up doing a second 3,000 walk around the block.

The long walk is usually my first walk of the day, getting in 3,000 to 4,000 steps. After that, it is 1,000 steps at a time. I need the breaks. Otherwise, I’m just sitting on my bottom. When I taught in the classroom, I was always up and moving. It was the same when I volunteered here in Hawaii. Working on Zoom forces me to stay in place. While I love working on Zoom, the lack of movement is a downside.

    I met with ninth-grade K. We started working with Raisin in the Sun. The opening section, which sets the stage, literally, is written in complex, no, convoluted sentences. The play’s dialogue is written in the black dialect using what was known at the time as non-standard English. I used WbyW, a process of asking detailed questions about each sentence, one sentence at a time. It was hard work for both of us. Hansberry wrote this play in the fifties when white people were more than happy to assume African Americans were intellectually deficient. People would hear the dialect and say, “They can’t even speak English correctly.” I still hear some people say that. Some British people assume Americans don’t speak correct English. In the introduction, she used convoluted language to show people she could produce complex sentences with fifty-cent words. She wasn’t writing in the dialect because she couldn’t use ‘correct English.”

     We wrote a story in our first session, working on putting visual images into words. We were now working on converting words into visual images. His mother told me his English teacher reported she was seeing a difference after an hour’s work. He was more engaged and participated in the classroom discussion. His mother expressed concern about our time together when he had school assignments. I told her I was working on the material assigned by his English teacher. The educational support person, JL, told his teachers that my job was to teach him comprehension and verbal skills, not help him with homework.

  Judy and I had a very long discussion about I don’t know what, but it is lovely to have a friend I can hold an hour-long conversation with.

    While my before-dinner walk with Lutz and his son Brian, Carol passed with Luke and Max and yelled, “Hey, Betty. Stop walking so fast!”  Yes, indeed, my pace has picked up. Everything I have done and others have done for me has contributed. Still, a big change happened after my last session with the acupuncturist. She observed my walk. I was swinging my left leg through instead of swinging it. She did some work on the leg and back. I could focus on lifting the left leg. It changed the way I engaged my thigh muscles. There was a dramatic increase in muscle firing and muscle development. Will I be able to resurrect my atrophied muscles? Will I be able to defy predictions? Keep posted.