Wednesday, January 25, 2023

 Wednesday, January 25, 2023

           I had an appointment with the acupuncturist. She worked on my upper back again. I have this muscle running parallel to the left side of my spine. It would do well as the deepest note on a bass cello. It contracts everything on the left side of my body. She didn't know the name of the muscle; it's a superficial one. This 'superficial' muscle ran from the top of my head to the little toe. Not so superficial. I get headaches on the left side of my head. Now I have an explanation. Of course, I still don't know why this pattern developed.

   The chiropractor used cupping on me for the second time. For those who don't know what that means: She has a set of glass 'cups,' more like drinking glasses. She holds a lit match inside the cup and then places the mouth of the cup on my skin. A vacuum is created as the heated air cools. She moves the cup around on my skin. The vacuum causes the skin to be lightly drawn into the cup. I don't know the theory behind it. I believe it is used to break up fascia. She worked the area at the top of the shoulder. I had some interesting-looking hickeys afterward. Hickeys are the usual outcome of this procedure. Scott, who had them applied differently, had two rows of those circular black and blue marks lining his spine.

   I was supposed to have Adolescent D today. At the eleventh hour, his mother called to ask if we could move the class to Thursday at four.

  Then, I had Mama K's crew. I discovered that fourth-grade K's teacher had rejected Fortnight as a topic for his essay; no violent video games allowed. I wrote his teacher:

 

Kingston told me you rejected his work on Fortnight. I'm delighted to hear it. These video games freak me out. 

On the other hand, I was delighted to be able to use a topic he is passionate about to get words out of him. I will use anything. The more I get students to talk, the better they verbalize their ideas.

Here is the work we did today on Rocket League. I hope this will be okay. This is not an organized piece. My goal is to get him to articulate his thoughts. Mostly, I still have to pull the information out of him with questions. However, there were a few incidents today where he went into detail on his own.

   

   The work with the girls continued as usual. Twin A is progressing. We are reading the same third-grade passage every week. She started guessing words. This is a good development and a big one. It's good because she uses her background knowledge to help guess the word. It's bad because she is ignoring the letters on the page.

   Twin E was ahead of Twin A a year ago when I started working with them. She knew more letters of the alphabet and learned new ones more quickly. Then, it reversed. Twin E took conscious decoding to an extreme. Both automatic processing and mindful decoding skills need to be developed.