Wednesday, December 11, 2024

 Wednesday, December 11, 2024

    I went to bed at 9 and was wide awake by 12:30 a.m. Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t fall back asleep; I got up at 2:30. I called Kaiser’s travel department to make flight arrangements for December 26, 2024, for my heart tests in Honolulu. Kaiser has its main facilities there. People living on the outer islands fly there for specialized procedures. I needed an echogram and a stress test. I had an earlier appointment but missed my flight.

   I checked my Amazon orders. After the presidential election, I checked my emergency supplies of rice and beans and ordered fifty more pounds of both. I’m preparing for the worst-case scenario. I thought they should have arrived already. They will come at the end of the month.

  While I had gotten up at 2:30 and did some work, I returned to bed and got up late.  I didn’t do my morning exercises, but I did do my walk with Elsa.

   I had a text from Kaiser that my antibiotic for my UTI was available a few days ago, but I hadn’t found a convenient time to pick it up. While the symptoms had been mild when I consulted the Kaiser after-hours advice line, the results proved I did indeed have an infection. This morning, the symptoms were more pronounced. I had to get to the Kaiser pharmacy quickly. I made sure I was there at 8 a.m. when they opened.  

  I was their first customer.  The pharmacy clerk couldn’t find my prescription. I was afraid of that. Had I waited too long to pick it up?  She searched her records and found it.  I had to wait ten minutes for it to be prepared.

   Afterward, I went to Home Depot for gardening supplies and a magic eraser, reportedly good for removing scuff marks from ceramic tile. I’ve had white tiles for the last twenty years.  Some dislike walking on their hard, cold surface. I like it. I don’t like the scuff marks.  I tried everything I could think of to get them off. The previous owner of our Columbus home had tried everything to clean the scuff marks. Nothing worked. I finally looked for a possible solution on YouTube. Sure enough. WD40 or Magic Erase.  The WD40 did a pretty good job. I wanted to try the Magic Eraser.

 I needed a nap when I got home. It was still early. I had to water the 42 newly planted shrubs before I could nap. The chickens are constantly digging up new holes. I  asked B to stop feeding and providing water for the wild chickens so they would move to another location until the plants were properly rooted. On my morning walk with Dean, he confirmed this is what chickens do. Only one plant was in worse shape since yesterday.  A chicken had moved one of the softball-sized rocks I laid down to protect the roots.   I may have to get forty-two tomato towers to protect the plants. Once I’d done my gardening chores, I took that nap.  I slept for over two hours.

  I texted Mama K to make arrangements to meet the Twins. Twin E was available during the day; she was home from school. While I worked with Twin A on fifth-grade material, I worked with Twin E on third-grade material. We went over the spelling of the word many again.  We covered it in the last session. I wasn’t concerned that she didn’t remember how to spell it; I was concerned because she didn’t remember the word in front of her in the previous sentence.

    The other day, I asked Twin A if she had improved her reading. Yes. She indicated with her hand that she made a huge improvement. Twin E is behind, but this method might work for her, too. Twin E recalled much of the sentence as I dictated it. Twin E is the one who fell out of the two-story window. There may be some residual brain damage.  Given that these girls didn’t know the alphabet by the end of first grade, after preschool and kindergarten, this degree of short-term recall is amazing.

 I also had a session with fourth-grade GV. We continued with the spelling of a dictated sentence. I developed this approach over a year ago, calling it The Phonics Discovery System Phase III.

   I dictate complete sentences. Students get to spell one syllable and multisyllable words. They get to spell words that conform to the phonics rules and some that wildly violate all phonics rules.   In our last session, I taught GV how to use visual recall.  There was no neurological problem. He just hadn’t used it. Today, he expressed frustration with a system as inconsistent as English orthography.  He said he was confused.  He had made some progress with his distress.  GV is not comfortable with uncertainty. Good luck! 

    I asked him if he thought life would make perfect sense for him when he grew up. did he think that while people often behaved in ways that made no sense, someday he would understand it all?  He would have perfect knowledge.  I told him this was the human condition. We all had our own understanding of how life worked. We are all annoyed and uncomfortable with others for their differences.  The best we can hope for is that we will get less annoyed and less uncomfortable with those differences and possibly even enjoy them.

 I think of human relations like Venn diagrams. When we increase the degree of overlay, we don’t become smaller; we become bigger.  We have to learn to live with confusion. I told him I  believed his learning problem was largely caused by his difficulty with dealing with confusion. He is easily overwhelmed. I proposed I lead him through the ‘release’ protocol. “I let go of anything bad about my hatred of confusion and hold on to anything good about my hatred or anything I still need. And then the opposite: “I let go of anything bad about my love of confusion and hold on to anything good about my love or anything I still needed.”  The session was almost over. I suggested that he consider whether he wanted to do this exercise.  He could do it in our next session next week or the week after. He had to set his boundaries and find a surface that felt comfortable. 

   I worked with fourth-grade LG on rounding to the nearest 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, and 100,000. We had worked on it for two weeks. Last week, he was secure; this week, he was confused again. We had to start from scratch. I started the spelling approach with him. He is further behind than Twin A. It made me appreciate how far Twin A had come. Holy cow! Things are going swimmingly with my tutoring.  I love it.

    This dictation/spelling or is it spelling/dictation approach is working like a charm. I teach the students to sound out the word, syllable by syllable, and represent each sound. In the process, I cover the phonics rules.  English spelling is notoriously erratic. I instruct the students to pick a logical spelling for each sound. Spelling animal as anamal is an excellent choice.  I affirm which letters represent the conventional spelling and which don’t. I teach them to memorize only some of the letters. 

   At the end of the day, I took the laundry off the line.  I felt a difference in my left arm. It was much easier to raise it.