Tuesday, February 27, 2024

 Tuesday, February 27, 2024 

   I woke up in a messy mood, agitated. I surrender to the musings too easily. Unfortunately, I have had success through this process. I often think of something I can do to improve a bad situation. That doesn’t happen frequently, but it is often enough to keep me hooked. It’s hard to battle. The best technique I have found is breathing into the frontal lobe. What does that mean? How does one breathe into part of the brain? I have no idea how to explain it. You either understand it, or you don’t.  

    I thought I heard rain while doing my morning Gentle Seated Yoga, but I also thought I must be imagining it. How could I hear rain over running water from someone’s shower and the yoga video? 

I looked out the window and saw no signs of rain, no puddles with bouncing drops of water. When I went outside for the morning walk, low and behold, it was raining. My alertness to the sound of rain has become acute from my years living in Hawaii.

   When Mike and I first moved here, we would ask, “Are we hearing the sound of palm fronds being buffeted by the breeze, or is it raining?” We would need visual confirmation. Now, I can hear rain over other sounds. The perceptual system learns in each new environment.

   When I went out to the lanai, I could smell the mulch. This is the first day it impacted me. There was no smell when it was first delivered. I was so relieved. With this morning’s rain, the mulch is soaked through and stinks. I bought an enzyme to make the mulch break down faster. Will that make it smell more? Will it make it smell for a shorter time? Will this last for eight to nine months?

   I made my second attempt to mow the lawn at the lower level, which meant using the electric lawn mower Darby and Patrick lent me. I tried to attach the grass catcher but discovered I had no memory of what Patrick had shown me the other day. Darby came over and repeated the steps. I had to remove a piece from the inside of the machine that blocked the machine from spitting the grass out its back instead of dropping it on the ground. Darby also helped me with the second problem: how to open the battery case. If I didn’t insert it, I was going anywhere.

   I did the second and third loads of towels. One room is almost back to normal. I had emptied out my linen closet to cover every piece of furniture before the delivery and spreading of the mulch. Remember, I can’t close off the common rooms from the outdoors. The dust kicked up by distributing the mulch would have created a mess.

   I had one session in the morning with 26-year-old S, who I worked with eight years ago. She had stopped coming. I never knew why. Once, I bullied the neurologist to take her off Adderall after 14 years of unsupervised prescription refills, creating all sorts of problems. She needed time to fully recover from its effects and get used to the new her. She’s back now because she wants to learn to read. She is a good student. When she was seventeen, no one tried to teach her how to read, and she couldn’t remember anything because the seizures caused by the Adderall interfered with retention. Now, she is quickly adopting my suggestions. One of her bad habits is guessing a word without confirming her conclusion. That’s what bad readers do. I wanted her to substitute doing nothing for just guessing the word using the first letter and maybe one or two others in the word. She did that immediately.

    I am not saying guessing isn’t a good reading strategy. Quite to the contrary, it’s one all good readers use. We anticipate the next word; we predict what will happen in the next paragraph, the next chapter, or the end of the story. Prediction is a vital reading skill. Good readers confirm their guess. If it’s right, they move on; if it’s wrong, they have the tools to see that and revise their thinking. Poor readers don’t check and don’t revise.

   I had three scheduled sessions this afternoon. One with Mama K’s crew, one with Adolescent D, and one with first-grade B. The one with Mama K’s crew was a complete bust. They were at the paddling site. The girls only paddle on Mondays and Wednesdays, but their brother paddles on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The twins are only ten, not old enough to stay home alone. That means the twins must be at the paddling site four days a week.

 Mama K tried to connect them to Zoom on the phone. It was a complete bust. First, Mama K had to redownload the Zoom app. Once they were on, it almost immediately dropped. When it held, their voices were unintelligible. We would have to limit our sessions to Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. I am particularly anxious to record Twin A reading a third-grade passage. True, she has read it before. I suspect she couldn’t read a third-grade passage this smoothly. However, she is not on a Kindergarten level, the level the teacher has her reading at in school. I am furious. Hopefully, I can record her reading this passage and an unfamiliar third-grade one.  

   The work with Adolescent D is progressing. I am pulling words from a New Yorker article about Cate DiCamillo, nice big chewy words, and a few I selected to cover a phonics rule. He continues to progress nicely. He no longer goes mind dead when I introduce something new, really anything he isn’t confident in. He takes on the challenge each word presents without hesitation. He is open to discussion and correction. I share my thoughts about the pattern with him. Figuring out the pattern in an English word is often confusing. There are lots of surprises in the English language. I love being surprised. I think this quality is necessary if you’re going to work with the approach I’ve developed. It is one of the qualities of mind I try to teach my students. It makes them good learners.

   Finally, I had first-grade B at 5 p.m. She zoomed through the Fry sight word lists 101-125. There were a few words she didn’t recognize. I worked on decoding skills with her. I should have her down to one half-hour session a week or two fifteen-minute sessions a week.

   I fell into a trove of TV mystery series. It started with The Sounds on Amazon. When that finished, Innocent popped up as the next selection. Both were excellent, with good scripts, well-directed, good acting, and compelling. 

Now, the next offering is Restless. Michelle Dockery and Charlotte Rampling are in it. How bad can it be?