Tuesday, May 14, 2024

 Tuesday, May 14, 2024

     I cleared the lower yard of fallen fronds today. The big stash the gardener left is gone. Now, it’s just picking them upp as they fall from the trees. I shoved them all into a large plastic trash barrel on wheels. I add the branches I cut from the red flowering bush from the upper front yard and wheeled the container down to Patrick and Darby’s.  I thought it must be a sight. The bouquet of dried fronds with some fresh green branches with red flowers looked like a pagan effigy.  It looked bit scary. The movie The Wicker Man came to mind, although I don’t think anyone looked quick like my display. Darby came out and said they needed a picture. 

    We had two days of fantastic rain fall.  Yesterday’s was intense enough to  float a 2 by 2 two foot plank of wood Darby and Patrick use to even out their driveway down the street and into the drain.

   In my session with twenty-six year old S today, I talked about how she was going to get driving lessons. She said she drove once, suggesting that that should be enough.    Obviously, someone in the family would teach her. That’s how I learned.

   My uncle taught me after my dad had died. He came to our house every Sunday for dinner. He was very committed to the Jewish tradition of taking care of your brother’s family when he died. He actually proposed to my mother, and he couldn’t stand her. Fortunately for everyone’s sake, my mother thought that was an absurd idea.

     I took  a driving course at the high school. It was half a credit. He took me out to practice every Sunday. I told S she needed someone in her family to teach her how to drive. She said no one was available. I thought she must be exaggerating.  Her sister lives with her. She could give her an hour a week.  S needs to learn the basics and needs to learn the rules of the road. Is this family so dysfunctional they can’t even do that for S?

   I looked up the requirements while we were in session and read them to her. She need thirty hours of driving time before she could take the road test. She covered her eyes and became silent.  I said nothing. I thought she was crying but couldn’t be sure. I asked her if she would prefer to stop the session. She said yes.  This woman’s life if filled with disappointment. I can understand why she has a low tolerance for things not gong her way.  Her situation is painful for me to observe. I can’t imagine what it feels like to live it.

   Yvette came up this evening to film a video of us laughing. She signed up for an online Laughter Yoga course. A guru/doctor from India created this form of yoga.  He says the body doesn’t know the difference between real and fake laughter.

  Yvette wants to become a certified Laughter Yoga instructor.  She videoed us laughing together to fulfill an assignment. I am committed to the forty day challenge of laughing at least one minute a day. At the end of the forty days, we will video ourselves again and notice any changes.

  I went to Ulu Wini today. Third grade SP was the first student to come. In the past, I’ve had to chase him or one of the workers had to order him to work with me. No more.  I asked him which Reading Roots book he was up to.  He went and got a hard copy of #11.  He read it accurately and focused perfectly on each word as he read it. So much for the theory he had ADD.  His distractibility  was just anxiety.  He had read that book before. I asked him to get one he hadn’t read before so I could see how he read that.  Amazing!  Again, he read every word accurately.  I could see he was applying my decoding strategies. 

   SP had all sorts of problems when I started.  His speech was unintelligible, and he couldn’t read at all. He wasn’t particularly cooperative with me until the day I broke down every word in a sentence into their phonemic units. When I did that, he sat up in his chair turned to face towards me and was transfixed.  It was that day, I realized he is probably not the lowest student in this group, but may well have the potential to be the brightest of the bunch.  He has a capacity for abstract thinking  uncommon in people who live is high structured closed social groups.  This doesn’t mean those people can’t think abstractly; it means their life style doesn’t require it and therefore they don’t acquire it.  Someone who trips across it by accident is the odd man out. It looks like SP needs to understand the basics behind an acitivity to understand it at all.  He reminds me of my learning style.

   Next third grade KJ approached me with a big smile on her face.  “You just want to show off , don’t you?”  Yep! She is doing spectacularly well.  I gave her a third grade passage for the Barnell Loft series. She read it with ease.

   Then fifth grade RM sat down. She reported that the work we had done already made a difference in her school performance.  I’d describe her as bright, but that just means she responds well to academic instruction. In our last session, I noticed she didn’t follow the references as the vocabulary changed. I did a follow the bouncing ball exercise by color coding each reference. I didn’t choose the best text. It was at a first grade level. She needs it at a higher level.

   Finally, 5^th grade ML came to work with me. We worked on three fifth grade  passages. I taught her visualization techniques.  It blows my mind when I discover these kids don’t visualize the message of the text as they read. It doesn’t even occur to them.  it’s not that they don’t visualize.  If their mom says, “Clean your room!” they visualize what their room looks like and how it will feel to clean it.

   I love working with the kids at Ulu Wini. I don’t just work with the lowest kids. I get to work with a wide range of skill levels and add to their arsenal of skills.