Wednesday, September 4, 2024

 Wednesday, September 4, 2024 

       I read an old update. I saw the name of one of my students. I remembered the name but little else about her. I think she was in one of the lower elementary grades, first, second, or third.  I assume I worked with her on her reading, but I don't remember anything about the work. I have no idea why my relationship with her ended. I looked up her name on my calendar. It's worse than I thought. I worked with her between January and April of this year.  The sessions stopped because it was the end of the school year, which ends in May here.  When she the next school year, she may have been doing well enough to not require more tutoring. Most of the kids I work with improve their reading during breaks in the sessions.  That is not the usual pattern. My method works to teach students how to teach themselves how to read.

   I got some gardening done today. I took down several haole koa trees in the upper north corner of the lower lot.  These trees had many bean pods on them, holding the promise of lots more haole koa. They're aggressive enough as is.  I pulled off every pod before putting the branches with leaves into the trash barrel for Dean.  I dropped off what I collected.  I could have waited until I had more. The lot is still rampant in these trees. I would have had to drag the half-full barrel down to the bottom of the lot. Wrestling with it didn't seem worth it.

  I had an appointment with Shelly, my therapist/life coach, for the first time in three weeks. She had been in Japan visiting her daughter, a special ed. student. The daughter is bright but has a slow mind and presents as different. Her life has not been easy. The daughter decided she wanted to move to Japan to study Japanese. It seems to be a good fit. She's there on her own and doing okay.

    My topic was the trauma as a result of the hyperbaric treatment and its aftermath.  My ears hurt badly as the session started. The attendant, the doctor's receptionist and wife, had to lower the pressure.  I was comfortable after that. That night, I  woke up badly frightened about my first experience in the tank.  I felt helpless in that situation. You are entirely dependent on the response of someone outside that pressure-sealed tank. You're sunk if you have a problem, and they don't respond. Shelly was supportive of my fear and told me not to work with these people if I distrusted their willingness to respond to my needs. 

    They gave me reason to doubt their ability or willingness to respond to what I asked for. Responding doesn’t me giving me everything I want. It means acknowledging that I asked for it and treating the request with respect.

   I had a conversation with the doctor that alarmed me.  he told me I could strengthen the bones in my forearms by doing squeezing exercises. He told me to do twelve reps three times but didn’t make it clear what I should use to do the squeezing. Every time I asked he what I should use, he repeated twelve reps three times and ignored my question. I realized he had a hearing problem.  I use exaggerated lips motion suitable for someone who relies on lip reading to hear. He still didn’t get it.  I finally got through to him but it took a lot of effort. I had a similar problem with his assistant who monitored my experience in the tank. Their behavior was frightening. How can I rely on people who don’t listen or don’t hear?

   I could have worked with the fifth-grade Twins today, but no one was home to make them get on. They're passively resistant. I don't blame them. They work hard. Someone unable to repeat a four-word phrase verbatim has difficulty in school. People respond to them either with annoyance or judge them as stupid.

   Once, deaf people were considered stupid because they couldn't understand or speak.  Then, hearing aids and lip reading came in. Poof! Deaf people suddenly weren't so stupid anymore.  I'm betting the same thing will happen with people who suffer from auditory processing problems.  While they're not deaf, they have difficulty processing language.  For them, everyone sounds like they have a bad connection. They hear every other word and have to infer what someone means. Besides not understanding what others have to say, poor auditory processing problems interfere with memory. How can you remember what you didn't hear in the first place? Secondarily, how can you remember what you don't deliberately record in your working memory?  I know some people hear things once and can remember them. I'm not one of those people.

   I had a session with fourth-grade LG. Again, we had problems with the Zoom connection. The new computer was up and running again, but it disconnected and reconnected repeatedly. I have no idea why we were having this problem.

   Today, I had LG read a passage and tell me what it was about. While he was somewhat hesitant and sometimes gave incomplete answers, he was okay. then I went back to the IN THE BOOK exercise.    Here's a sentence we worked on.

   Bicycle riders are learning to take better care of their feet.   They wear shoes with stiff bottoms.

IN THE BOOK:

1.         Who wears shoes with stiff bottoms?

The answer to the question is 'they."   All he has to do is give the word missing from the question.  He can't do it for love nor money.  I see it as a problem because he can't do something that doesn't make sense.  Now, that discernment is a positive trait until it becomes a negative, as are all our traits.  It was that trait that had him entering third grade unable to read.  I think he has improved because he learned how to round numbers to the hundreds place following the teacher's instructions, and he follows them beautifully.  He didn't get bogged down asking why round numbers. He could just follow the directions and figure out the meaning of rounding afterward. 

 I was that way in school. Many people commented on my intelligence when I was a kid., but I didn't find school easy.  I thought I was a mentally retarded overachiever.  School was an agony for me.  I couldn't just follow the teacher's directions. I had to know the deep meaning of everything before I did it.  That's what this boy is like.  I want to save him from this.  I think he does it to avoid confusion and chaos.  I may have done it for that reason, too, but I don't think so.  My dad taught me that school learning was a waste of time and to always seek a deep understanding. He spent most school nights by my side, helping me as I wailed, "I don't understand." And "I can't do it." I really didn't understand it by the standard he had set.  This pattern continued until I was twenty-six.  I was sitting with a group of friends and said, "I understand it here (pointing to my head) but not here (pointing to my solar plexus).  A friend declared, "Finally."  I had no idea I had a choice.  Once I got it, my life became much easier.