Friday, December 29, 2023

 Friday, December 29, 2023

       I slept very well. I woke close to five am when my alarm went off. The tapping app helps me sleep soundly. It blocks troubling thoughts, which can leave me exhausted in the morning.

  Ninth grade L was my first student at Ulu Wini today. She said she wanted to work on writing and verbal expression. I did a co-writing exercise about a Christmas celebration at her church. She described the Marshallese social dance. People of all ages participate. Sounded great!

   Josephine, the head social worker at the community center, sat down and asked me to tell her what I was doing with 

the students. She had a list of all of them I worked with. Wow! I had no idea they were paying that much attention. They’ve been keeping track of how many I do a day. Wild. I proposed we meet during the day after the kids return to school after the winter break. It would be too tiring to confer with her after two hours of tutoring.

  Today was the first day of sunshine after 13 days of a dense grey cloud hanging over us, blocking the sun. Where the solar system usually provides 70-75%, during this period, it provided a high of 68%, a low of 28% with an average of 48% daily. When I looked at the mountain when driving on Queen K parallel to the ocean, I saw the cloud cover hover over Hualalai and nowhere else.

 Third-grade S from Ulu Wini is way behind. He has trouble speaking Marshallese as well as English. I sounded out all the phonemes of words. He watched my face intently. He was lip reading. Does he have a hearing problem? I would have to talk to Josephine about this. He should get a hearing test. In the meantime, I worked with him, repeating and blending sounds. We did some work on memorizing the alphabet. He didn’t even know the alphabet song.

  I worked with third-grade L, the son of one of the employees. He’s bright as a whip but insists that everything has to be done his way. He reminds me of my great nephew, Sid.

    The children are responding well to the method I developed for memorizing. I see improvement as they work on the sight word lists. Some show a little bit of improvement, some a stunning amount. None are up to grade level.

  Some students can’t remember the word of and try to decode it. These kids have very weak memory systems. Any improvement is huge. It’s somewhat like getting a car moving from a dead standstill.

  I worked with eight kids today. Reno read just fine. No way I could have made all that difference. Why did he waste my time yesterday? He said he didn’t need to work, but he kept passing near me today. he obviously wanted to meet with me again. I’m not quite sure why.

  I was Maestro last night. I thought it was magnificent. I assume it will sweep the Oscars.