Wednesday, December 4, 2024
I was up at four this morning, working on the updates. I get the most done in the early morning hour.
I took an early morning nap. The distress caused by what the healer said hit me. I had to wonder why she framed my directness in negative terms. It triggered sadness and shame. This is what my mother always said to me. ‘No one likes you. I’m the only person who does, and that’s because I’m your mother. I’m the only person you can trust to love you enough to tell you the truth.” That ‘truth’ was never anything positive.
I can handle negative feedback from someone who is generally positive about me. I don’t expect people to like everything about me all the time. People who hang with me have to enjoy my directness, but that doesn’t mean they will like every direct comment I make.
Mike enjoyed my sense of humor, but there were moments he didn’t think I was funny when I meant it to be. He would say, “You’re not funny.” I would say, “ What I said wasn’t funny.” The best professional comedian has duds.
Eli, the gardener, came today. His son wasn’t with him. I anticipated communication problems because his English is weak. When he arrived, I asked him if he read Spanish. I brought him to the lanai, where I had my computer set up with a Spanish-to-English translation program. I wanted to ask him about the soil amendment.
Four large containers of product were sitting in my car trunk. Mixing the soil with that much product seemed like a lot of work. I wanted to know what Eli had in mind when he said he would bring what he needed with him. He smiled and said I didn’t need anything. We walked down to the plot, and he showed me why. He picked up a handful of the soil, let it fall through his fingers, and offered it to me to smell. “See how loose and how rich it is? You don’t need anything more.”
The area had been covered by large Ficus trees with massive roots, threatening the nearby rock wall and concrete driveway. Those trees had to go. I spent several thousand dollars to have them removed with a backhoe, removing roots as well as trunks, and the area covered with mulch several feet deep. Then I had to wait 8 months while the mulch broke down, creating this rich soil. When October arrived, I wasn’t prepared. I had to decide what to plant and how to get them planted. All overwhelming decisions.
Eli said the first thing he had to do was flatten the area. The chickens had created holes, making the surface irregular. Chickens dig holes to ‘bathe,’ not to find food. Eli got the job in a stunningly short period of time. I was expecting him to take the whole day. It was a few hours, and all the plants were in the ground and watered. He had dug an additional hole for me at the side of the house where I wanted to plant another Kua Gardenia for the one that died. Some bug got into it. I didn’t catch it in time, and the bug won.
While Eli planted the shrubs, I went to my neighbor’s yard to pull vines and baby haole koas before the roots became stronger than me. These trees grow deep roots, making it almost impossible to get out. My neighbor did it with chains and a truck. I did two weeding sessions with a break in between. I stopped when my back or legs started complaining. I didn’t want to be out there in a weakened condition. Between sessions, I napped.
I had a session with 4th grade GV. I asked him if he enjoyed jigsaw puzzles. He did. I told him the English orthographic system was like a jigsaw puzzle. It was big and confusing, but there was a pattern that could be figured out. I spoke about short and long vowels. He said he had never heard of them before. Could that be possible? Could he really have had three, almost four years of school and never heard a reference to long and short vowels? It might be possible if his teachers were devoted to the Whole Language method. I pulled up the vowel chart. He saw the pattern on his own: the sound of the short vowels is different from the name of the letter, and the sound of the long vowel is the same as the name of the letter.
I also had a session with fourth-grade LG. His recall of the odd and even numbers was perfect, and he could apply his knowledge to larger numbers. I continued working on rounding. Given 768, he could round to the nearest 100s; given 78, he could round to the nearest 10s place, but given 768, he couldn’t round to the nearest 10s place. He didn’t understand the relationship between rounding and place value. I made a chart with instructions. I created an exercise I hoped would help him see the pattern.
Round to the nearest:
10s 100s 1000s 10,000s 100,000s
176,542 176,542 176,542 176,542 176,542
He dropped out of the session. Huh? Afterward, I found out his mother’s phone had died. We had to use his phone because the Internet connection in his area was inconsistent. Let’s see if this works. I’m prepared to do several rounds.
I haven’t been working on reading with LG because he’s been improving nicely on his own. My methods teach students how to learn. I’ve only had one student fall behind after a break, and it was a shock.
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