Saturday, March 29, 2025

Saturday, March 29, 2025 

 

    I woke up early this morning, around 4 instead of 4:30, as I had been. I went back to bed. Then my alarm went off.  I must have set it for 4:20 am instead of p.m.  I finally got up around 5:30 and was on the road with Elsa for our morning walk by 6.  When I got home, I did my yoga exercises. I had breakfast and did my morning puzzles, Wordle, New York Times Mini, and Connections. Then, I went to work to finish up with the plumbagos as planned. My next project was the green waste the gardener dumped, blocking my access to an additional stretch of plumbago.  

   I hadn't taken a load of green waste to Darby's in a while. I got two Home Depot orange buckets and loaded them with small green waste. The sun was too intense to be comfortable outdoors. I went inside and read. 

     I called Jean,  my friend, to find out how she was. She was at Target. She said her sciatica was bad. I asked if she had something to hold on to.  I instructed her in an exercise that involved walking in place. Push down on one heel to push forward, and engage the muscles at the back of the leg and the glutes.  Push the hip forward with a concentration on the groin. Only one side should open. Allow the shoulder on the same side to roll back.  Relax and do the same thing on the other side.  She got some mild relief. 

    I worked on updates. Then I remembered it was Saturday.  I forgot to work with the Twins. I needed to do that first thing in the morning.  I called Mama K to see if I could catch them.  She said they were just on their way to the beach. They had expected me in the morning. Mama K had gone paddling, but someone was home to help them connect on Zoom.  I felt terrible.  I'm lucky I remember which day of the week it is.

   My mind had been somewhere else.  I was so excited about ZN's remarkable progress. Not only is he responsive in the session, but he understands the purpose of the exercises I give him and immediately adopts them as his own. It's amazing.   ZN stays in aftercare until 5 pm every night.  I have a fantasy of him teaching the other kids in the program. 

    While I would love some recognition for the work I've developed within the profession, the more significant frustration is that I have something that works. I can't get teachers to use it.  That drives me nuts. The phonemic awareness aspect of my reading program would be difficult for most teachers to adopt. They don't know how to teach reading, don't have the most basic background in phonemic awareness, and need to look good in front of the kids.     Most teachers know phonics; commercial programs try to sell phonics to teach phonemic awareness. It works for some kids, but phonics and phonemic awareness are not the same. If students know the alphabet and have phonemic awareness, they can learn how to read and discover phonics independently. That doesn't mean they wouldn't benefit from some explicit phonics instruction. I don't believe anyone can become a good reader in English without knowing how to teach themselves. 

    The English language is indeed confusing. Most methods of teaching reading don't make it less so. They try to present it so it's simple. It's not. It involves a lot of flying by the seat of your pants. You can consider that fun or a nightmare.  It is manageable. English isn't a language where you can count on a one-to-one correspondence between the sounds and the letters that represent them. You have to think about the likely possibilities or have the word memorized. 

    Even then, phonics comes in handy.  You figure out what you can rely on when sounding out and what you need to memorize. Few need to be entirely dependent on memory. For the rest, you can get a pronunciation close enough to figure out the word using context.

  I've been listening to "Let Them" by Mel Robbins, which was recommended to me by my friend Jean.  It's a book about focusing more on what you want to achieve rather than how people respond to what you are or do without disregarding the needs of others. I've been talking about it for years, although I certainly couldn't do as well as I liked. The only person comfortably on the same page as me was Mike. My question was, what do you do when someone is committed to disliking you or laying trips on you?  That's too comfortable for me. I have to cut out. Robbins agreed. Sometimes, you have to cut your losses. 

   Dean and Nina were over to play Sorry and visit. They had terrible news about Kaiser. Our local clinic is falling on bad times. Now that Nina and her coworker are gone, no one can run the autoclave. It takes the edge off Kaiser's professionalism. Also, they have eliminated OBGYN from our local clinic. My problems can be taken care of by a PCP. I don't think a pregnancy is in my future.

   I was down before they came over. Visions of success are disturbing.  I had a crisis of nerves when it looked like Steve might be interested in my reading method to take to India. It's a method that will work with any alphabetic language. I was so hyper I needed medication. That's when I started on the Seroquel.  My reaction isn't quite as bad now. I'm not expecting any teachers to credit me with the improvements in ZN reading. Usually, the classroom teacher is unaware that I'm working with a child in their class. This time, the classroom teacher is aware.  Despite the impact on ZN's reading performance, teachers and parents often explain my impact away, saying, "The child finally grew up."  I prefer not to get too much attention. It's an area of inner conflict for me. Whenever I received praise, my mother went into her mama bear routine, attacking the person who praised me and me. Sometimes, I didn't even hear the praise; all I got was the attack. If I told my mother about the praise I received. Oh boy! I was told that no one would ever say anything like that to me if they cared about me. 

  By the end of the day, I had loaded a barrel of green waste for Darby and wheeled it over there. 

  I watched the first three episodes of Ludwig. It's a detective story with a comic twist. It's very well done, and I enjoyed it.