Friday, August 9, 2024

 Friday, August 9, 2024  

    Wow! It was only noon when I  sat down to write this, and it had already been some day.  First, I slept like a top last night. When I woke for the first time, it was already daylight. I got Elsa in harness and went for my walk. I saw Dean and Nina at the end of the street.   Nina greeted Elsa joyfully. She checked her for lesions. Her skin was doing very well except around her neck.  They had to turn around and head home quickly because Nina was doing the extra Kaiser shift that day.

    Nina reported that the crisis at work had been resolved. Nina works part-time at Kaiser, three days a week. She supplements the work a man does full time cleaning the doctors' instruments.  A new supervisor had come to town, a twenty-year-old with ideas of her own.  She brought up complaints against the full-time employee. She wanted to get him fired with only two years left before he qualified for retirement. That young woman's supervisor joined forces with her to persecute the man.  As far as Nina could make out, this second supervisor had a personal vendetta.

   Kaiser is a union shop. The union rep advised Nina to write a letter declaring she would not accept a full-time position if the man was fired and to refuse to work. Her contract stated that if there was something else she had to do, she could not be required to come to work. Nina suddenly became very busy.

    Yesterday, the issue was resolved. The man received a level one 'punishment' out of a possible four.  Four would mean he was fired.  The HR department advised him to attend the meeting and let it go. Apparently, that 20-year-old something had done the same thing to another elderly employee.  Dean thought she was clearing the place out so she could bring in her own people, whomever that might be.  I think of her as the Meagan Markle of Big Island Kaiser. She planned to come in and change everything. The arrogance of youth.

   I walked Dean and Nina back to their house. Dean said he would be out again walking the moment Nina left for work. I told him I had an eight a.m. appointment and was in a rush. I planned to do the whole walk, but Elsa had different ideas. She knew the shortest route home and campaigned for it, pulling on the leash. I thought, okay, I'm in a hurry anyway. 

    I fed her and then went about putting touching finishes on the lanai so I didn't look like a total slob; I ate my breakfast and did my morning puzzles, Wordle, New York Times Mini Crossword, and Connections. I was getting better at all three.

   The family arrived: mother, father, and child. The third-grade boy has a severe learning problem, and no normal teaching program can address it. 

   The father had worked with him on the concepts of more and less, which he didn't know last week. I did a quick test and could see the words were now a secure part of his vocabulary. He can learn to apply words to label concepts.  Last week, he knew the concepts of big and small. This was an extension of those concepts, but not a small extension.  It looks at the same two objects from a different perspective.

   I decided to start with phonemic awareness today. I wrote the word MOMMY. Third-grade C could name the letters but couldn't tell me what sounds they made.  He searched his memory for what he had been told. I modeled the sounds showing him the mouth formation for the M.  He could follow that. Then, I talked to the parents about school options. 

   I recommended he have an aide in school with him at all times. She or he would be trained by the father and/or me to follow through on exercises we designed.  While the father has no background in education, he thinks the way I do. I had never met anyone whose thinking pattern was like mine before in my life. I don't mean we come to the same conclusions; our mental processes are alike. Truly remarkable. The prospect of this project is exciting. But there's more I learned today, which is breathtaking.

    After that interruption, I returned to the boy and asked if he could remember the sounds. He did a great job on the M but got stuck on the O. However, when I told him to hear it, he could identify it. He looked lost when I asked him the sound of the final M in Mom.  I told him it sounded like the first M. He got that. I talked to the parents again, creating a distraction, returned to the boy, and asked him to remember the sounds. He did. I burst into tears.   His ability to do that demonstrates that his short-term and working memory were in working order.  This boy can learn. 

   We still needed to learn about his long-term memory. From what I have read, memory is downloaded to long-term from working memory at night when we sleep.  I think there are other ways to accomplish that. I am experimenting.  

   I asked him about the spinning he experienced in his left hemisphere, which he had told me about in our last session. He remembered talking about it. He pointed to the same spot on his head.  He affirmed it slowed down when he was asked to think. I associate the slowing spin with underperforming students. I have only one student who challenged that theory. Today, I asked him to draw the pattern.  He drew one moving from out to in in a clockwise direction. When I asked him to draw it a second time, he drew it from out to in but in a counterclockwise direction.  

   At one point, I asked him a question he couldn't answer. I watched his eyes move back and forth, not scanning our faces or the air but with a clear inward focus. Holy cow! This indicates a profound capacity for learning and retrieving information. Since he sustained the search for at least six seconds, it suggests a tolerance for not knowing and confusion, essential traits in a good learner.  

   It didn't feel right to do the spin release with him today.  I don't know if it ever will. With some kids, all I do is give the cues for observing the pattern calmly, and it resolves itself. Giving students the knowledge that the spinning can be resolved is sometimes all that is necessary. Students do it on their own, most likely in their sleep.

   At the end of this session, I understood why these parents thought he was a normally functioning child. There is good evidence of substantial intelligence. We only have to figure out how to teach him to access it.

    Then, I felt it we had enough. I told the parents it felt right to stop the session. When I checked the time, it was almost exactly half an hour. I was exhausted even if the child wasn't. I put in a tremendous amount of concentration in that session. I felt a little dull-headed and needed to stop. I prefer a maximum of half an hour for sessions. I don't know if the students are good for more, but I'm not.

    I lay down after they left. I felt exhausted and drained. I needed a short rest to get ready for my Hula class. When my alarm went off, I went out to the yard and loaded as many of the bunches of Bismarck palm nut clusters as I could into the trunk of my car, with the intention of stopping by the transfer station on my way home. I put a small pail of loose nuts in the driver's seat so I wouldn't forget to drop them off.

   After the Hula class, my next stop was UPS to make an Amazon return. Then I headed to the Post Office to mail Damon a jar of MakesNoClaims (Intrasound). The jar was too large for the small Priority box.  The woman next to me at the table, where she was packaging something of her own, observed me and recommended I use the bubble envelope provided by  USPS.  I didn't know that was possible. It easily held the jar, but I thought it needed more padding. I took the jar home to wrap it properly. 

   I left my car in the post office parking lot while I went to the bank next door. A clerk was available immediately. I cashed a check and am getting cash back to cover my payments for Casey and Joseph. 

    The bank clerk had a glass filled with what looked like an ice cream soda treat.  I ate a whole container of leftover ice from Damon and Cylin's visit. It was the first time I had some since Mike died. I suddenly wanted more. The clerk said an ice cream shop was in the strip mall across the street. 

   I walked down the mall looking for the shop. I stopped in at one. I knew it wouldn't be Haagen Das, but I was only looking for a smoothie. I chose the strawberry banana. How bad could that be? Wow! Impressively so. The woman poured milk into a container. Then,  she opened another refrigerator and pulled out a squeeze bottle with red liquid. That wound up being the strawberry banana something or another. She dumped in a substantial amount of crushed ice, and put it under the blender.  She then placed the cup under a machine. It placed a 'lid' on it. I stared at the concoction I had just purchased for $8.  How did I drink it? The young woman pointed to straws in a container sitting on the counter. She must have thought I just landed from Mars. I might as well have been. I was so unfamiliar with what I had just seen.

    I took a cautious sip of the concoction. The ice hit me hard. Could it cause a heart attack? I took one more sip and threw the rest into a trash barrel where it belonged.

   Then I went to the transfer station.   There was only one car waiting in line before me. Access to a shute opened quickly. I wanted to back my car up to it to make the trip with the bunches of Bismarck nuts from my car trunk to the shute a short one. Besides wrestling with that mess, I anticipated the ripe nuts falling off the branches and creating a hazard for others.  These nuts are the size of walnuts. They roll. If someone got them underfoot, they could take a nasty fall.  The clusters look like grape clusters; only the branches are four to six feet long. 

    As I got out of my car, another car pulled into the slot next to me.  There are two parking spots per container.  I commented on my bad parking. I wasn't backed up to the shute but to the fence next to it. It was a near miss to an accident.  The other driver was out of his car and said, "Hello, Betty."  It was Mark, the former owner of the Bikram yoga studio, who had had his own adventures in the last five years. I decided not to ask questions since one of his 'adventures' was a disastrous marriage. Mark helped me unload the nut clusters.