Friday, January 19, 2024

 Friday, January 19, 2024 

 

   I was exhausted at 8 pm. I tried to stay up but made the mistake of lying down. I fell asleep. The rest of the night was that twilight sleep. I was relaxed and in a light sleep. I started some stinking thinking. I didn't get up at 5. I had turned the alarm off. I hit the road for my morning walk at 7 am. This was very late for Elsa and me. 

I fed her before we left the house.

    I caught up on the wedding. I moved the fallen fronds from the back to the front of the house to reduce the work for Saturday when Steve planned to come with his truck to help me take it all to the transfer station.  

    I have been doing regular weeding. Darby has been my inspiration and support. I once said that she and Patrick were good gardeners. They mostly live off what they grow. Darby said they were less good gardeners than persistent ones. Wow! I can do that. She said they had to pull out half the plants they put in. It's trial and error before it's success.

     I have to do the weeding myself because I fired the gardener after he gave an unsatisfactory answer to why he planted five Ficus trees in a 100' x 20' space with a rock wall behind it, which grow into huge trees with a huge root system that takes out any cement in their path. "I didn't think of it." A Ficus tree grows to 60' with a trunk diameter of 4' to 6' and roots that will take out anything in its way. Planting them in that space is a disaster waiting to happen. The roots will take out not only the supporting rock wall but also the driveway behind it, along with the slab foundation of the shed. These trees are lethal to anything in their way. How can you not consider the consequences of your decision?

    I thought to ask Josephine, the Ulu Wini community center social service administrator, if this was a pattern among the Marshallese. The gardener is a Marshallese immigrant. Yes, indeed. They don't think about the consequences of their actions. I feel sad on so many counts. I feel sad for these poor people who had to leave their beloved homeland because of the cavalier use of their environment to test bombs, destroying their land. If they feel sad, they have to lose a social structure where thinking of consequences is unnecessary because every action is prescribed. Everyone knew what to do by the time they were six.  

   The Marshall Islands consist of 29 atolls and 5 islands for a total of 70.05 square miles. The atolls are occupied. Each island is occupied. The total population as of the 2021 census was 42,418. Each island is its own world. Options are limited. That can be good or bad; it's certainly relaxing. You never have to 'think;' all problems have been resolved. I know these people grieve their loss.

   These poor people have moved into an environment where many encounter more people in a single day than they might have in a lifetime on their island or atoll. The unexpected is the norm; thinking is a necessity. I feel bad for rejecting someone on a cultural basis, but I don't care for the consequences of his actions. I can't trust his judgment.

   I worked with Adolescent D before going to my Friday session at Ulu Wini. He wanted to continue working on an article on the active versus the passive voice for school. I told him to look for the presence of the verb to be before the active verb. He had no idea what the verb to be consisted of or what it meant to conjugate. I had to go through all that and then explain the passive and active voices. I chose some random sentences from the material I had on hand. Oh, boy, was that ever a mistake. 

I should have stuck with the article and their explanation. It would have been much clearer. As usual, the paradigmatic examples don't begin to illustrate the complexity of the language.  

  I was so confused I wrote to my grammatical resource, my sister, to ask for help understanding the sentences I had randomly selected. Dealing with my confusion was helpful. I have a better appreciation of the resistance of others to using my method for 

teaching phonics, which requires teachers to deal with all words, not just the carefully selected 'phonically regular ones. I ended the session with D, telling him I would investigate the issue with my sister and do more research.

    I left for Ulu Wini immediately after working with D. There were a few outstanding encounters. I worked with eight children in an hour and a half. Third-grade L got his report card. The teacher saw a remarkable difference. His reading problem cleared up. L told his teacher it was thanks to his tutor, Betty. What he didn't tell her was his problems were resolved after three fifteen to twenty-minute sessions- and some discussions with his mother on her efforts to inhibit his outgoing personality. L is bright as a whip and wonderfully exuberant and appropriately entitled as far as I'm concerned.  

   L's relationship with his mother reminds me of mine with my mother. She was beside herself with my outgoing personality. "Stop bothering people." "No one wants to talk to you." 

     She was raised in a world where children knew their place. They were not to have conversations with random adults. She had trouble talking to random adults. She lived in a constant state of terror about just about everything due to the traumas of her life. She was constantly suppressing or criticizing me. It was a nightmare. L's mother would criticize his behavior with me when I had no problem with it. I had to tell her repeatedly to let me deal with his behavior and not to interfere. I had enough confidence in my relationship with her to tell her to teach her son to look for tells when his behavior is not being well received instead of telling him not to explore connections in the first place.

    The teacher said there had been a huge change in his schoolwork. His reading problems have mysteriously cleared up, and a radical attitude change exists. He is making an effort to conform to the school's expectations. What made the difference? I explained that understanding what someone says is not the same as agreeing. He started answering reading comprehension questions from the author's point of view instead of his point of view.

   Two other students demonstrated remarkable differences. I worked with a total of eight students today. Two little girls stood out: a second grader and a third. Third-grade LA zoomed through 150 words on the Fry sight word list. What!! According to my notes from my last session with her, she had trouble remembering of, the second word on the sight word list. She had been decoding every word. All I did was show her how to recall words automatically. All those words were already encoded in her memory. I just showed her how to retrieve them. 

I released her from the severe restrictions of compulsory decoding.

   Those opposed to teaching phonics cite examples like this. 

Their objections are valid. Automatic processing must be taught to be used with all words once they are securely embedded in long-term memory.

   The second student to demonstrate a difference was second-grade T. 

She also had problems with automatic recall. Most of the students have problems with this. She struggled with the first 25 words on the Fry Sight Word list. What was remarkable about her was what she did to stimulate recall. 

  I teach students to 'see' the letters of word in their mind and then 'hear' it. I touch their forehead and say, "What are the letters?" Then, touch their temple on the left side and say, "What is the word?" As T struggled to recall the words, she touched her temple on the left side of her head- and the word came up. Wow! This works even better than I could have imagined.

   It was Darby's night for the walk. I asked her to bring over some oranges from her garden. A volunteer had brought oranges for the kids. They were eating them in front of me. I didn't take one because I couldn't eat and teach. But it stimulated a craving. Darby also brought back her bucket to pick up more green waste. She will be taking all my green waste except for the palm fronds, which are huge and reluctant to break down in a compost pile.