Monday, November 4, 2024

 Monday, November 4, 2024 

     I’ve been sleeping well. I might wake up around 4:30, but that’s an acceptable time. I can always nap during the day.  Napping is a favorite activity of mine. If I don’t get enough sleep during the night, I can make it up with a delicious nap during the day.

    As I doze in the morning, I continue observing the vibrations in my body.  I may be feeling them more because of the bodywork I’ve been doing. I’ve been correcting my posture with the Gokhale method.  As a result, I’ve been releasing tension in my upper back, shoulders, and upper arms.  When I was a child, I dealt with my fear by tensing my body, clamping down on those pesky sensations.

    Lauren Bacall explains how she got her sexy look. She clamped her chin down to control the shaking in her body. Fear can make us look good, really good, given Bacall’s looks.

   Eli, the gardener, finally came over to plan what we would do with the area where I had the Ficus trees dug up at great expense. I had several feet of mulch dumped on top to suffocate the remaining roots. I had to wait several months for the mulch to process. It’s time now.  Eli calculated I would need three rows of plants with fourteen in each row.  I planned to plant Hawaiian hibiscus, a shrub with a white flower. He gave me the name of the company that sells the black drip system.  I will buy the hoses on my own and lay them down.  There’s a faucet right nearby that works. I’ll hook the drip system up to that.

    I worked with Twins. Twin E is progressing better than twin A, although she is still half a year behind her sister.  The school repeatedly says they need more phonics. They don’t absorb what they hear. The more I encounter memory problems, the more I believe the problem is with the attention system rather than memory. Students have no idea how to pay attention to get the information sufficiently embedded in their minds to be remembered in the first place.  Steve, who served as a principal in UN schools in Asia and South America, said he’d seen an increase in memory problems. 

   Telling the twins something repeatedly doesn’t work. It goes in one ear and out the other.  I don’t know how often I’ve told them, “When you don’t know a word, you first find the vowel letters. Then you figure out which ones make a sound and what the most logical sound might be.”  Then, when I ask them what is the first thing you do, they don’t have a clue. it seems to help when I tell them to repeat my words. I have to remember to do that. So many of these kids have memory problems.  They remember little of what they see or hear that wasn’t triggered by a strong emotional response.

   I usually work with fourth-grade MH on Sunday. She took off from school on Monday because her mother had to do work on the Big Island. There was no one to take care of her on Ohau, so she had to accompany her mother to the Big Island today. I agreed to a Zoom session at 11. I put it in my calendar, but I didn’t set my alarm for 10:50, giving me plenty of time to set up.  

   I incidentally checked my phone. There were two calls from MH’s father.  OMG!  I had forgotten about the session.  I continued with E.B. White’s The Trumpet of the Swan when we connected.  The language is much more complex than Stuart Little and the story is more engaging. Working on this book exposed her cognitive weakness. She doesn’t use the information provided in a sensible way.  She picks out isolated bits of information. Other students do that, but hers feels different. I think this problem plagues her in interactions with friends and family as well as in reading.