Wednesday, September 7, 2022

 Wednesday, September 7, 2022  

 

  When I walked Elsa this morning, I had put only one of Elsa's legs through the harness strap. That was scary. She slips out of the harness when we come home the moment she feels it loosen. She would' attack' a car if she got out of the harness while we walked. Needless to say, she would not win. I would lose her. I checked. If I pulled the leash tight, it worked well enough. She was not going to get out of the leash.

   Darby called to share her husband's thoughts on the word for a hunting catch. Eighth-grade K needed the word when writing the story of his hunting expedition. Yesterday, while I was talking about it with Lutz, Darby saw us and joined us. She had no idea. Melissa was sitting on the stone wall, catching a smoke. She didn't know. B stopped as he drove past to say hello. We asked him. While an avid hunter, he didn't know a hunter's term comparable to the word catch for fish. He called a friend. He didn't know. Later that night, B called. He had checked with another friend. That's a total of eight adults we checked. None of them knew the term. We decided there wasn't one, except for the word 'kill.'

   I was looking forward to working with Adolescent D today. I had so much fun working on an algebra problem with him yesterday. I wanted to have him do the same problem again, explaining why he did each step to cement the process into his mind. He said, "I knew how to do it before. I learned it in school." Then why didn't you do it?" "I was too lazy." I blew up. How dare he make me work so hard just for his amusement. D uses arrogance and contempt as a defense system. , This will cause him endless problems out in the work world. Imagine him saying something like that to a boss or a coworker after they worked hard to explain something. Hmmm! I don't see that as going well. 

  We started on a new problem. A= ½(b1 + b2)h. It was confusing for me, too. The first thing I did was divide the expression on the right by ½. That left me with A/1/2= (b1+ b2)h. Then I remembered that I had to resolve the parenthesis first, PEMDAS. The P comes first. So step one was A= (1/2 b1 + 1/2 b2)h. The two approaches produce the same results. I wondered if I had been right. I hadn't done any algebra since my freshman year of college. Working with D was hard work today, too. We worked through the second problem. I extended our session by fifteen minutes.

   I had Mama K's crew at 2:45. I was late because of the time I gave D. I had Twin E first. I asked her if she remembered what we worked on last week. She called out the word there before she saw the word. Then, she recognized it when she saw it. I asked her if she recognized the word when she saw it when she read in school. She said yes. Hopefully.

   She also recognized was the first time she saw it. She started to mispronounce it but caught herself. Then, she didn't recognize it when she saw it in the second line. I reinforced the brain sequence for automatic processing. She recognized some words more easily. She only read the first story in the Carpenter materials. She read it a bit better but was not ready for the second story.

   Twin A did reasonably well reading the second and third selections from Book A from the Carpenter materials. She did a little better but not good enough to proceed to the next passage.

   With fourth-grade K, I bumped him to higher-level third-grade material. I did WbyW, asking detailed questions on single sentences. We came across the expression "about once a year." I asked him, 'What is the opposite of about." We got into a long discussion about the difference between 'about a year' versus 'exactly a year." I asked him his birthday, using it to demonstrate what 'exactly once a year' meant. He said his birthday was on October 12. His mother called out, "October 16." He has problems with concepts of time. They are abstract. I would have to work on the difference between 'about' versus 'exactly.'

   Scott spent the evening preparing for his surgery tomorrow. He did his laundry and showered with the presurgical antibacterial soap. He had to get up at 4:30 tomorrow morning to be at the hospital by 6:30 a.m. 

  I set out for my before-dinner walk. I was several driveways down the street when I realized I didn't have my phone. My phone records my steps and helps me achieve my goal; I was at 9,500 steps. I headed back and started out again. Fortunately, I was compulsive about accruing my steps each day. 

   I finished watching Queen Marie. I knew she would be victorious; it's historical. The movie portrayed her as a lovely, composed, dutiful lady who looked like Queen Elizabeth. 

     On Point with Meghna Chakrabrady interviewed Douglas Rushkoff, author of Survival of the Richest. Billionaires are preparing bunkers for the apocalypse. They hired paramilitary troops to guard their communities out in the high desert. One man said his nightmare wasn't of men with guns attacking his bunker; his nightmare was of the woman with a hungry baby at the end of the driveway. His solution was to teach everyone how to create their own survivalist communities. Rushkoff mentioned this to his billionaire group. They said, "Don't be ridiculous. Why should I spend my hard-earned money on those people.?" Oh, boy. The very rich understand success as rising above all their mere mortals.  

  Rushkoff doesn't think the bunker approach will work even for the very rich. Their money will be worthless. There won't be replacement parts to maintain their controlled environment. The rich live in Poe's, "Mask of the Red Death." There is no escape from the ultimate destruction. The rich work to escape the human condition, the lives we mortals have to live.

   Rushkoff says the very rich do lose a sense of empathy with other humans. "Wealth erodes empathy." In an MRI machine, the parts of their brain associated with empathy don't light up \when they see pain.

    The original ambition of the tech world was to develop technology to create an environment for human creativity. Once they became powerful, their ambition became to make more money to gain more power. Decouple their responsibility for catastrophizing the future.     

  Those who have witnessed the collapse of economies understandably value capitalism. You need people to develop more under those circumstances.  

  I heard a talk on the Goldilocks principal. While there is such a thing as not enough, there is also such a thing as too much. Too much is just as bad for everyone, including for those who have too much.