Friday, December 8, 2023

 Friday, December 8, 2023

  It’s been an intense three days. On Tuesday, Jean, my friend, made reservations to come to Hawaii with her sister because her daughter was grievously ill in the hospital. She called Wednesday morning to say the doctor’s prognosis wasn’t good. I picked up Jean and her sister, Rosie, from the airport that afternoon and drove them to Kelly’s house. Thursday, I went to the hospital to be a witness when Kelly signed a POA and a DNR. Kelly was jaundiced with liver failure.

  Everyone was keeping knowledge of her grievous condition from Kelly’s ex-husband and the children, seven and nine years old. I was concerned the children could find out in school when some child yelled out, “Hear your mother’s dying.” Kona’s a small town. Everyone knows someone who knows someone. We have the local coconut wireless as well as Facebook.

    Jean, Rosie, and I went to dinner at the Korner Pocket Café after leaving the hospital. It was a sports bar with excellent food. Rosie’s was the best: delicious pork chop, mashed potatoes, and the best green beans I’ve had in a long while. I dropped Jean and Rosie at home and went home myself. I can imagine stopping off at the bar to pick up an order of those green beans.

    Friday, I picked up Kelly’s dad, Bill, from the airport and drove him to Kelly’s house while Jean and  Rosie picked up Kelly from the hospital. They were going to do hospice at home. I was very concerned about how they would get Kelly up the very steep driveway. She was already frail. She could barely hold the pen to sign the documents the day before. Jean proposed carrying Kelly up. Wild idea. She weighs 108 lbs. no way Jean could have lifted her, no less carried her up that steep driveway; I can barely walk up and down it safely. Bill proposed getting a young strapping neighbor to help. Someone came up with the perfect solution. They backed the car up the driveway into the lip of the garage. Kelly walked into the house with a bit of assistance.

    I went to Ulu Wini at two today, forgetting school didn’t get out till three. Two kids were using the playground equipment. Ipo yelled at one of the kids, asking why he wasn’t in school. He had missed the bus. I had worked with third-grade S before. He had memory problems. Today, I discovered he didn’t know the alphabet song, no less the alphabet. However, he recalled three shapes after a quick glance, drawing them accurately. That suggests his problem is hearing speech sounds or processing them. Covered them and asked him to draw them. He unhesitatingly responded. 

    His visual working memory is fine; he has poor auditory processing. I picked a miscellaneous text and broke down each word phonemically, drawing out the sounds. He was enthralled. He started imitating me. I picked up on that and had him repeat the phonemes as I pronounced them. He liked the work.

  The little girl wanted math. I showed her two addition problems (5+5+5=, 5+4+2= ) and asked which could be a multiplication problem. She caught on quickly. Children from collective societies are taught to learn what their parents do, not figure things out for themselves. She wanted to learn her multiplication table. I showed her patterns that would help her eliminate wrong answers if she did not give her the right one. I drew a series of shapes, repeated the pattern, and asked her which came next? This was new for her. Pattern recognition is key to figuring things out on your own. We also worked on identifying the odd and even numbers. It was as if she had never seen it before. I drew a vertical line to model what odd and even looked like. This will allow her to figure it out independently. Finally, I taught her the memory trick to help her memorize her times' tables. 

    I taught her my method, which emphasizes embedding the image in visual working memory, and the Fernald technique, which uses VAKT, writing the equation repeatedly.