Tuesday, April 15, 2025

 Tuesday, April 15, 2025

  I slept well but woke in a pit of a mood. My bad moods seemed to be getting worse, and I was concerned I might be digging myself into a hole. There are life circumstances I can't change that make me sad, but I have enough of a life to be content.

    I had time in the morning, so Elsa and I visited Paulette to get more Kangen water. When we arrived, we had trouble finding even one stuffed mouse. Elsa located one on the end table next to the rocking loveseat. Paulette threw that for a while. Then, Elsa couldn't find it.  Paulette peered over the railing of the lanai. There, it lay on the ground below.  Paulette headed down with Elsa to get it.  When she came up, she said there must be another one around. She found a white one; then, she had a black and a white one. Before she left, she located a green one.  Elsa was in heaven.

    I had to leave before 11:30 because I had an appointment with Tomi, the craniosacral therapist. I had to drop off Elsa before heading out. As I made the U-turn to go down her driveway, Paulette told me to turn off the motor and come look at the front of my car.  I had smashed into some shrubs, making the turn. I assumed there would be some damage. She said no, it was something else; I was to come and look.  When I did, I saw a narrow black plastic strip that resembled a refrigerator gasket. It didn't look like a serious problem. I was in a hurry.  I would drive until the car told me it would quit. Then I'd call Tomi to tell her I had a problem and couldn't make it.

    After dropping Elsa off at our house, I drove to my appointment. I got there 10 minutes early. Tomi's energy is spectacularly good. She works in silence, focusing on physical changes.  She asked if the left hip replacement caused problems with my right hip, which I was having some issues with now.  I told her the doctor told me that the arthritis was worse in my right hip than in my left before the surgery.  The pain had been worse in my left hip because an accident had caused an angled joint.  Also, my left thigh was visibly different from my right one in my twenties. The left thigh was slender; the right looked beefy. I preferred the look of the left. It was the underused leg. It was the disparity of use that caused my hip problems, back problems, neck problems, etc. This problem had been in the making for a long time.

   While Tomi thought the surgery caused problems in other joints, I thought it caused changes in the body that people didn't consider significant. They were just relieved to be out of pain. I had to look away as I watched people move after the surgery. I saw how they were moving their bodies, freshly liberated from pain. I saw how that movement was impacting their other joints. Ow!! No wonder they needed a second hip replacement and two knee replacements to boot.

    After my session with Tomi, I drove right to the Kia service station.  Joe took one look at me and gave a wan smile.  I told him I thought my car yearned to be home at Kia. No, it was not the old problem the shop had worked on for several years.

   A mechanic came out, bent down, and peered under my car.  While the gasket was no longer visible from the front, he could see it. He said it was installed during the manufacturing process to protect certain parts of the car. Joe asked if I wanted him to remove it. He said he couldn't guarantee it wouldn't do damage to something else.  If I kept driving with it dragging, it would eventually catch on to something and detach.  I chose that.

    I immediately went to Ulu Wini to tutor the kids in the low-income housing units.  I was there by 1:30, expecting to have time to work on my updates. However, I saw fourth-grade LK playing on the playground equipment. I asked him what he was doing at home. He had a doctor's appointment. Did he want to work with me?  Yes, he needed help with comprehension.  I did a fourth-grade IXL exercise for the main idea. He had no concept of categorization. When I asked him what apples, bananas, and oranges all had in common, he had no idea what I was talking about.  I don't think he was ever exposed to the concept of categorization.

   I ran into the same problem with second-grade JM.  I see this problem a lot, not just among children from poor families with little education, but among my white middle-class students whose parents went to college. Huh?

   I finally had second-grade KK. He also wanted to work on the spin release. I thought he would fight against it. There's no way I would force this on someone; it's too profound a change. I also told him I didn't feel well enough to work with him. I need to be alert and watchful of the children's reactions during that process.

   I also discussed the warts on the palm of his hand.  He couldn't work with the slime because they were contagious. He first told me he was born with them.  I took a close look at his hand.  Yes, he had some 'freckles' on his palm, but that didn't explain the grey, rough, raised spots. He said his mom would take him to the doctor when they had the money to have them lasered off. They had been diagnosed as warts. I said they could buy something at the drugstore. He said they didn't have an extra dollar. They had no money.  I first volunteered to buy it for him. Then I thought better of that idea. I could get in trouble. I spoke to the director of the center. She said he had insurance. She would talk to the mom.

   I had my second session with a fourth-grade OW. He tests at the high third-grade level, the mid-fourth-grade level, and the low fifth-grade level. I turned my attention to comprehension and his insecurity. I did the WbyW activity, which uses questions instead of sentence diagramming to figure out the relationships between parts of sentences and sentences to each other. He did very well. I encouraged him to form the questions. I never do that. He's the only student I could do it with without extensive training.

  As we worked, he frequently glanced to his left. I asked him what he was looking at. He said his younger brother was a few months younger than him and in the same grade. His mother wasn't asking for help with that brother.  Oh boy. Is that brother soaring ahead? That would be hard on the nerves.  I did some EFT tapping with him to relieve his fear of making mistakes.

   OW had closed the door to his room to prevent his brother from sticking his head in. But then, at the end of the session, it sounded like his mother was in the room, talking to someone else, perhaps his brother.  It was disturbing.

   I had my second session with fifth-grade ZN at the end of the day.  He didn't want to read the two Carpenter stories we had worked on so far.  he wanted to work on the sight word list.  He got stuck several times on the first twenty-five words, which are the most frequently appearing words in any text in the English language.  That's how the Fry list was compiled.  

  The original sight word list was published by Dolch in 1936.  He was a proponent of the Whole Word method, a precursor of the Whole Language Method.  Both methods opposed the use of phonics in teaching reading. Fry's was the result of a computer program that ordered the words by their frequency of appearance in the text. The word 'oil' is 78 out of 1000.  Words 1-100 are on the first-grade list. I doubt the word can be found in any first-grade children's literature. The literature used to compile the list includes newspapers. Oil was a high-frequency word when the list was generated. What would its place on the list be now?

  I don't remember how the next activity came about. ZN must have proposed it. He wanted to spell words.  I got a surprise, more like a shock.  His spelling was excellent. 

He generated the list. Basketball,  meeting,  Hot Wheels, Hawaiian, light, and  Happy Valentine's  Day. Basketball,  meeting,  Hot Wheels, Hawaiian, light, and  Happy Valentine's  Day.  He spelled everyone correctly.

  Seeing how well he spelled, I dictated words to him from a second-grade text to see how he would do: A baby only three days old likes water that is sweet better than water that is not sweet. Even a baby can tell one kind of water from the other. Except for spelling the final -er as -ar, he spelled every word correctly but couldn't read the words he had just spelled. Oh, boy.

   I remembered Aylett Cox, the woman who created the Alphabetic Phonics program, where I got my certification as an Orton-Gillingham instructor, saying that she could not help children who could spell better than they could read.  Let's see if I can find a solution.