Wednesday, April 17, 2024

 Wednesday, April 17, 2024

    Another great night’s sleep! If this continues, I’ll stop commenting on it. Wouldn’t that be nice! 

I’ve been a good sleeper since I left my mother’s house for college when I was seventeen. I had a bad bout of insomnia for two and a half years after my dad died in March of 1956 before I left. It was pure hell.

    When I got up shortly after five a.m., I put the lawn mower battery into the charger. I wanted it fully loaded so I could mow the strip along the street first thing in the morning and then move the lawnmower into the shed.

    Last night, at the end of the walk, Darby told me she was 

upset that I had left the lawnmower on the front walk instead of in the shed. She had told me to shelter it. It was sheltered there -from rain. But that wasn’t her concern. Her concern was the impact of the sunshine on the plastic. 

It never occurred to me. She assumed I understood the problem. She has lived in Hawaii for forty years. She has seen the damage of our intense sun on plastic. 

I was a mere novice. I’ve only lived here ten years. When I finished mowing the strip, I immediately put the mower in the shed and called Darby to let her know.

  I had an appointment with Shelly at 9 a.m. I continued working on my resistance to doing more to promote my teaching methods. While I don’t like being ignored, I’m terrified of being attacked. People can go crazy when you present something other than what they’re used to.

    I gave a talk on a reasonably benign topic at a conference, demonstrating how all facial muscles are involved in pronouncing speech sounds and how to use that information to teach students. The room was packed, standing room only, and that barely. One man became agitated and thought to tell me off. Really? I wasn’t too invested in the topic and could let it slide. But some of my approaches are quite different. 

A supervisor once observed me and screamed, “I’ve never seen that before. It could never work!” I’m still recovering from that one.

    Because the references to past life stories were meaningful in my session with the clairvoyant, I chose to continue with that. A story I hadn’t focused on in a while came up.

   An aside on past life stories: I have no investment in their being true or not. I’m not one of those people who go around proudly claiming to have been Cleopatra in a past life. Any past life stories I generate are full of unresolved trauma, not great glory. The one that came up today was about being an oracle in ancient Greece. Believe me! There is no glamour here. The stories only have value because they have meaning for a person.

   I don’t know how much of this conforms to what is known about the lives of the women who performed those roles, but this is what I got.

    In ancient Greece, ‘talent’ scouts would visit small towns looking for young girls who might be suitable for the role of an oracle. I was chosen at the age of ten. I was so proud. Being chosen was considered an honor for the girl, her family, and the village. The life was pure abuse.

   I was kept in a large basement area with other women. The ceiling must have been two to three stories high, which means the basement was that far underground. There were no amenities. By that, I mean no beds, toilet accommodations, or heat. We lived in filth. We were raped regularly by the priests who came down to relieve themselves. On the occasions when we were required to oraculate, we were cleaned up, clothed in rich robes, drugged, and presented to the public. The priests ‘interpreted’ the nonsense that came out of our mouths. 

   Why did they use women? Because women were considered to have the power. All men could do was translate. When I was no longer useful, I was returned to the village.

    For the first time, I saw parallels between my relationship with my father and the Greek women’s relationships with the priests. My dad thought women had some special connection to wisdom, creativity, and imagination. He envied that connection. He wanted whatever pearls of wisdom came from my feminine child brain. I did my best. I never was able to generate a totally original idea. Christ, Buddha, or some scientist had thought of it before. I think my dad was looking for a solution to man’s hostility to his fellow man. As a survivor of two world wars and his personal survival of the holocaust, I can understand his need. As a Jew, he hoped for a messiah. He was open-minded enough to consider that it might be his daughter inside of a son. You may have noticed. I failed in solving that problem. In my early twenties, I called myself a ‘dropout messiah.” I put that burden down- as best I could. At least, I limited my ambition to more reasonable expectations. I think I have made many lives better with my teaching. My dad did help me develop that gift. It wasn’t all bad.

   The electrician from Provision Solar came to check my system. Unlike the sales rep, he talked to me at length and gave me no information. Nick assured me I would be dealing with the supervisor from now on. I’ve been doing some research on my own.

   To qualify for the tax rebate, I will have to replace the whole system, but I will still save money. A generous warranty covers the old system. The 300 panels in the old system are no longer made, so broken ones can’t be replaced. I will get 400 panels with the new set. They will be good for about five years before they’re no longer replaceable. With the warranty, I won’t be putting out additional money. I may even make a profit.

   Mike objected to the system, saying it would never be amortized in our lifetime. He was wrong. It will amortize in two more years.

   I had a Zoom appointment with the Twins after school. Her mom wasn’t home. She had her high school daughter set up the Zoom session. It hit admit, but no one was there. The older sister, S, must have set it up and called one of the girls to come. They didn’t. I called their mom. Twin A appeared. She moved from one spot to another. When I finally got her to sit still, I asked her how she felt about the sessions and how she felt about her reading problem. She said, “Sad.” I asked her how long she felt that way. “Since I was five.” She has been aware of her difference since Kindergarten. This is good news.

     I can hear someone reading this and asking how this could possibly be good news. So far, the girls have given no indication of being troubled by their disability. This lack suggests a serious cognitive problem. If she’s been aware and aware of her awareness since she was five, it gives evidence of intelligence. I teach how to learn. I think she assumes she can’t. I assume she doesn’t know how.

   We all have varying strengths and weaknesses. I don’t know why we develop that way. We have to deal with our weaknesses calmly and figure out compensating strategies. There are only a few people who can look at something once and remember it perfectly. People who experience failure assume they can’t learn and resist using strategies because they think it’s proof they’re stupid. Twin A insists on making guesses using the first letter. As long as she does that, she’s working against herself.

   I did the underlining exercise with Adolescent D for the second time. Wow! We color-coded every syllable pattern we encountered it in the paragraph, even in the ‘irregular’ words. An, ef, ib, oc, ud, etc. are all VC patterns. 

Then ane, efe, ibe, oce, and ude, are all VCe pattern syllalbes. The full list are V, VC, VCe, VV, Vr, and final stable syllables. I created one other syllable pattern: Vh, as in ah, Vw as in ow, and Vy as in ay as a single category. Then I broke up the Final Stable Syllable caterory into different groups, -ion, -ious, and all the Cle syllables. We categorized every syllable, whether regular or not.  

    I argue that you can figure it out if you get a pronunciation close enough. English requires the reader to figure out the words from context. What does the word ‘cook’ or ‘sign’ mean in a sentence? (He is a good cook. 2. I like to cook. 3. I have new cookware.)You must infer meaning from context in English; it is a must. Students have to be trained to do that.

    I categorized said as a VV word. If you read it phonetically, you get /sayd/. If you pronounce the word with the long /a/ in context and can’t figure out the word is /sed/, that problem must be resolved.

  D told me he wouldn’t be available on Thursday. His mom called me to tell me he wouldn’t be available Thursday or Friday; he was going on a field trip. Later in the day, she texted me to ask if I had helped him write a poem he presented to the class, Humpty Dumpty. He wrote it, and read it to the class. The teacher was so impressed that she wrote to his mom immediately. D is very hidden. That he would write the poem no less get up and read it in class is amazing. Given that he cheated on the reading test he took on the computer and had the test read to him, I am a little concerned he got this poem off the internet.