Tuesday, April 16, 2024

 Tuesday, April 16, 2024

   I woke up around 4 a.m., which was a good time. I had a negative thought, which turned on the shame mechanism. I'm not sure what it was, but it was something trivial, like Elsa's new harness not working. My unconscious mind took that 'personally.' It reminded me of an event with my mom.

    At 81, she had a desperately needed cataract operation. Shortly after that, she got up on a ladder to get a roll of paper towels she had stored there.

     Because of the eye operation, she had trouble seeing. The new lenses are not adjustable; they're fixed. The focal point for her vision was set at three feet. She had to lean away to see what was on the shelf, which caused her to fall backward. On the way down, she hit a table, which broke her fall.

   I took her to my chiropractor to get checked. He said she was uninjured and suggested I would eventually have to take her out behind the barn and shoot her. (For those not familiar with the idiom, it means she is so resilient she would never die of natural causes.) (For those who wonder why I need to explain the idiom: I have over 95,000 hits on my public blog. Most of the viewers are from other countries, and most of those are from Asia.) in response to all this, my mom moaned that God didn't love her because he allowed her to fall. I reframed it for her. "Are you kidding?! "You're 81, fell backward off a ladder, and have no injuries. God must be madly in love with you." She smiled.

   I worked on my letter of complaint to Gokhale about the teacher I had for the personal sessions in the Elements Course. I love the method. Esther looked around the world for communities that didn't have backaches. She observed their posture and the way they sat, stood, walked, carried things, and performed actions with their hands. She put this information into a book and developed methods for teaching it. She is a good teacher. I got a dud. 

    I signed up for individual online classes, thinking I would get personal attention. I got a private viewing of a canned presentation with some observations of my attempts to execute the postural model.

I learned almost nothing at the cost of $234 an hour. At a rate like that, it should be a top-of-the-line service. It wasn't even fair. 

    I got 18  13-minute sessions for $234 an hour or $3 a minute. It wasn't even worth $1 a minute.

It took me a while to extricate myself from this situation. I wasn't comfortable confronting the instructor, telling her I thought she was a terrible teacher and wanted out. It finally dawned on me I could call the customer service line and do it without directly confronting her. She is possibly effective with people who are new to the method, new to postural changes in general, and have never paid much attention to body movement, no less had training. I had to write a letter of complaint. I doubted it would do much good.

   I mowed the large lawn today. I saw how overgrown it was yesterday when I went down to pick up the last of the fronds the gardener had thrown in a corner of the property without my permission. I take those large fronds down to Darby's. She considers all green waste gold. It is when it breaks down to fertile soil.

  When I arrived at Ulu Wini, fifth-grade M sat in the student's chair at the table set up for me, anxious to work. I asked if she wanted to work on comprehension or decoding multi-syllable words. She chose to work on the multisyllabic words. I gave her a few. She aced them. I packed her off with paper, a pen, and my Kindle to find words. She returned everything with three names decoded. That's it. It finally occurred to me she couldn't figure out how to turn on the Kindle.

   Last Thursday, Chantel told me she had problems getting one girl to understand subtraction with regrouping. I meditated on her and got she didn't understand place value. When I asked Chantel about it, she said I was right.   Second-grade M had no idea what the place values were. When it displayed place value, 1 has no zeros, and 10 has one zero; how many zeroes will the next number have? Blank. She didn't understand patterns. She finally got it and understood that the next number had two zeroes and the one after it had 1,000, etc. 

    Then, I displayed a number up to the 1,000th with all the numerals being the same. The student has to discern the difference between the values of the 4 in all its locations. I didn't confuse the student by introducing other numerals since she was confused about place value.

   She still had problems identifying the value of each numeral. I had to write the place value above each number, 1,000, 100, 10, 1. I told her to write the numeral in place of the one numeral. She could do it correctly at the end of the session, but I had to push. 

     When I finished working with M, she joined the children at the large table while I worked with other children. As I left, I rechecked her, on 4, 444. She nailed it. I wouldn't have been surprised if she hadn't retained it. Next time, I will vary the numbers.

   With third-grade LA, I worked on comprehension. Oh, boy. She had no idea how to glean information from a single sentence. Now she may not have understood the exercise because she had never seen anything like it before. I give the students a single sentence and then ask questions about the sentence.

   For example, The ball ran down the hill. 1) What ran down the hill? 2) What did the ball do? 3) What did the ball run down?   Linguists refer to this relationship of words within a sentence as the 'algebraics of syntax.'  It's sentence diagramming with questions. Since students are never required to look at language this way, it is a huge leap. However, I have found that doing this exercise, even once, makes a difference in their comprehension. We'll see how it impacts LA. It teaches how to look at sentences, something they can explore further.

   Her sister, first-grade JA, asked to go next. I worked with her once before. She was still struggling with the first 25 words of the Sight Word List. I used Fernald's VAKT with words she missed.