Tuesday, June 25, 2024

 Tuesday, June 25, 2024

 I had another good night’s sleep, and I didn’t do any stinking thinking.

 It was a nothing day. I didn’t do much.  Ulu Wini doesn’t have camp sessions on Tuesday. I just had the Twins this morning at 8:30.

   I started Twin A on reading a  Magic Tree House Book. Reading the words was a challenge, even the single-syllable words.  Multi-syllable words were beyond her. I had her tell me the spelling of the word. I wrote it on a whiteboard screen and led her through the decoding process.  I’m not expecting her to remember what I tell her to do now.

    I did work on memory at one point. I told A the rule for pronouncing the e in the suffix -ed. As a rule, it is silent unless preceded by a t or a d, as in treated or dreaded. There are exceptions, as in wicked and crooked.  I have repeated the rule several times.  She’s heard it often enough, so it’s in there somewhere. Today, I asked her to repeat what I said. As I suspected, she was unable to repeat it. She hadn’t absorbed anything I said.  Is this an auditory processing problem independent of an attention problem, or is just an attention problem?  Is it attention because she doesn’t know how to focus or because she goes brain-dead when she doesn’t immediately understand? Or some combination of all the above?

  Dwelling on the subject of shame again. Some advocate total freedom from shame as if shame is nothing but a harmful emotion. Some believe, as I do, that shame is hardwired into most human brains. It is to social connection as pain is to physical injury. Shame and pain are hardwired into us as survival mechanisms.  They warn us when we may be in danger and prompt us to take action.  (Since there are people born without a capacity for pain, I assume it is also possible for someone to be born without a capacity for shame.)  Shame arises when we are out of sync with our social environment. We must be out of sync with our social environment if we are alone. The delibating feeling of loneliness is a crippling shame.  If shame is strong enough, it means we have done something so offensive to our social group that they will either kill us or we will wish for our own deaths to be free from that suffering. These feelings are very primitive. Our modern brains have some say in the matter. We are not living at survival levels among relatively small groups of people. Our conscious minds understand our circumstances are not the same as our ancestors. Question: how do we convince our limbic systems of this fact?