Thursday, February 1, 2024

 Thursday, February 1, 2024 

 

I stayed in bed till six thirty. When I got up, I saw a new wet spot on the lanai carpet. Elsa peed indoors when she was perfectly capable of using the doggy dog. I checked, and nothing was blocking it. I have to get up and push her out that door every morning.

  God, I was cold on my morning walk. The chill penetrated my heavy sweatshirt. For the first time, Nina wore a jacket for her morning walk. February is colder than December or January. Our seasons run on a different schedule than they do on the mainland.

   I gave Nina a jar of MakesNoClaims I had in my sweatshirt pouch. She has a large, puffy keloid scar on her chest as a result of a simple pimple that became infected ten years ago. She goes for a cortisone shot every six months to subdue the itching. Nothing has helped. I explained what MNC was: an edible clay exposed to a particular sound frequency stirred into a surgical gel. There was a possibility she wouldn't be open to trying it. Dean assured me she was willing to try anything.

    The members of my family consider MNCs a joke. In fact, that's how it got its name. Damon, my stepson, looked at a jar of Intrasound Gel (its real name) and said, "Betty, it says it makes no claims." He thought it was a big joke. From that day on, it was known in the family as MakesNoClaims.

     My sister complained of an annoying skin tag. I told her I had gotten rid of some of them with MNCs. She agreed to try it. After several days, she called. "Betts, I'm sorry. It's not working." The next day, she called to say, "It fell off." I don't know how it works, but it does incredible stuff. Even I forget to use it when I need it most. I didn't use it after my shoulder and elbow surgeries. It would have sped up the healing process.

      I was badly depressed today. I wondered if I should even go to Ulu Wini. I didn't see how I could be helpful to the kids in that state of mind. To my surprise, the contact pulled me out of my funk, my loneliness. 

It was as much being in the real-time presence of a community of people connected to each other as the direct contact with the kids. The social workers seem to like each other and care deeply about the members of the community, particularly the children.

   When I arrived, the children sat around long tables doing their homework. Today, several children in 5th and 6th grade asked for help. M could read well at a third-grade level and understood the story but had problems articulating her thoughts because of her lack of fluency in English. 

    I used co-writing with M. I wrote her thoughts. She really did pretty well, but she sounded terrible. Her awkwardness made her sound inarticulate, more so than she was.

   Sixth grade Ch asked for help again. Josephine and Ipo approached me when I started volunteering, telling me about Ch. The story they knew was her parents had never sent her to school. Only when she moved to Ulu Wini and fell under the social workers' scrutiny did she start school. Ch told me a different story at one point, saying she had gone to school.

  She evaded me and my instructions the first time I worked with her. I asked if she was frightened. That got her attention. I could do some work with her after that. It made an immediate difference. The social workers who read with her said she was doing better. This time, she was off the charts. I must have worked with her for at least 20 minutes. She devoured the instruction. She is proving to be an excellent student. She should be reading on grade level by the end of the summer.

   I had a voicemail from the mother of a girl I worked with eight years ago. I only worked with her for a few months before she turned eighteen. Her mother did Bikram yoga as I did. I heard someone ask her how her daughter was doing. It didn't sound good. I was desperate to work with someone. I approached the mother and said, "I'm going to make you an offer you can refuse."

   The girl had a tragic story. The mother was on crystal meth at the time of her birth. The baby had to go through detox. At four, she was diagnosed as hyperactive and put on Adderall. At some point, I noticed she had seizures. She would go into a fixed stare and be completely unresponsive. I pushed to get her to see a child neurologist. My research showed seizures were a possible negative side effect of the drug. The neurologist tested her for epilepsy and insisted it couldn't be the result of the drug. She tested negative for epilepsy. I managed to bully the neurologist into okaying her getting off the drug while she wore the monitor. Her seizures stopped immediately.

  I found out afterward she lived with so much muscular pain she couldn't walk half a block. She never ran and played with her cousins. Her face was frozen, making her look stupid. All that and more was remedied by getting her off the drug. She was in a vocational training program at school. The teacher reported she was transformed from a sluggish girl to someone who took the lead in work situations.

   The doctors who prescribed the drug were legally required to meet with her once a month before renewing the prescription. They never did that. The family just accepted the doctor's word. When I mentioned the seizures to the mom. She said, "Oh, those. She has those all the time." Those seizures made it impossible for her to succeed in school. Each seizure resets the brain, erasing any information that hadn't already made it into long-term memory. That transfer process only happens during sleep. If a seizure occurred before she could sleep, goodbye to anything she had learned during the day.

    The 'girl' was now twenty-six years old with a three-year-old child. She was very depressed. She couldn't read a book when her child asked her to. She couldn't drive. She was a prisoner in her home. She struggled with the limitations.

   I agree to meet with adult S to teach her reading. We had made a lot of progress when I worked with her eight years ago. She went from zero to 

a second-grade level. I wondered if she had retained anything. We would see.

      I got an emergency text from Mama K. One of the girls had a math homework assignment she couldn't figure out. She sent me a photo of the worksheet. I looked up partial quotient strategies using rectangles to represent division long. Okay, that was a mouthful. I figured out how to do it. I knew the mom probably did something like that in her head. 365 divided by 5: 300 divided by 5= 60; Sixty divided by 5= 12, and five divided by 5=1. 

Therefore, 60+12+1=. To make it easy, add 12 +1= 13. And then 60+13= 73. They teach more mental math these days, but they don't make it fun. It's just another way to torture kids and parents.

   When I met with them, I explained the division stuff to Mama K so she could help Twin E. Then, I worked with both girls on automatic processing. I have abandoned decoding and comprehension for the time being until their automatic processing is secure. It will produce a dramatic difference in their reading performance. It already had. Twin A does very well with words she is already familiar with stored in her long-term memory. However, she did not use the process I taught her to embed unfamiliar words. The word area stumped her. I led her through the process. First, make all the sounds in the word in the order they appear. Then, say the whole word. Repeat those two steps at least four more times for five. Then, she closes her eyes, 'sees' the word in her mind, says the letters, and then says the word. Do that five times. The process teaches the individual sounds in the word, the orthography, and word naming.

   With twin E, the session is devoted to getting her to rely on automatic processing. She's so afraid it won't work she's reluctant to use it. We have to practice it together until she has enough success so she will have the confidence to do it on her own.