Finding Leah

Forgot that our kitchen clock stopped, I've been looking at it since 3:40 AM thinking it's 3:40 AM for hours.. finally I got tired of waiting out the wee morning and turned the puter on, which announced to me it's actually 6:AM.
I'm afraid of this morning's 8 am appt. with Mary Sun's mom. She's ( I'm chaffeurring) taking Mary Sun to the children's hospital for an xray. WHY? Because she thinks Mary Sun is too short. I've never heard of anything so ridiculous. Mary Sun is normal, she's just not TALL. The Mom thinks something is wrong because the father was quite tall and therefore the kid should be...wrong...I mean MAYBE....but certainly not always.
Mary Sun is 12 years old--give her time!--I grew 8 inches the one year I was 15. But no..Mary Sun's mom believes that after the onset of menstruation, girls cease to grow.
Whacky...I'm afraid because Mary Sun's Mom starts yelling at people whenever she goes out. The she asks me to be her witness that she's right and the other somebody is wrong, no matter who they are or what they have or haven't done--
it's all very heavy and exaggerated and probably not worth the time, hassle and money I get for subjecting myself to insanity.

Yesterday Mary Sun bombed her lesson, that is, after a month of various holiday and Mom's heart attack postponements it was time for verification-quiz reviews of the material in Chapter 6. Namely, simple past tense irregular verbs and the future.
Out of 42 responses she answered 15 correctly. Uh Oh, but not terribly surprising, she'd bombed last week's exercises quite similarly..
Under NORMAL conditions Mary Sun is quasi always a top knotch student. But life's pressures have been anything but normal for Mary Sun lately. Life and death issues are not easy to give order to in prepubescent adolescence.
I could not understand, despite the miserable results of the attempted verification, why Mary Sun insisted to both her Mom and I that she HAD learned past tense irregular verbs (which unfortunately need to be memorized as they are devoid of any common rule), when according to review, she'd successfully learned less than half of them.
Her plea was that she was doing exactly what her mother had always told her to do which is; Don't give them satisfaction. >"non vi dai soddisfazione".
I asked Mary Sun's Mom to explain to me what that meant.
The Mom has drilled Mary Sun to never voluntarily reveal to people what she understands or doesn't, always leave them with a doubt, she says. The reasoning? (fear/paranoia) behind this idea is that, IF you reveal to people what you don't understand, they will take advantage of you. (because people are evil, of course.)
I explained that as a teacher, it is essential for me to learn what is not clear yet to my students, so that I can attempt to help them learn what they haven't yet. What I DIDN'T say, but felt was; Don't you know that MOST PEOPLE don't take a liking to being fed BULLSHIT? The assumptive defensive proposition that you always understand more than me is offensive. It's not the understanding that's offensive, but the superiority stance. Because you don't want to give me the satisfaction of recognizing there are some things you don't understand--does not acceptably justify LYING to me.
Course, the GOOD teacher- patient and understanding--can't say any such thing.
In a nice twisted paradoxical way the good teacher learned A LOT from this lesson, however..
I've always known that Italians have incredible width and flexibility-- a talent for NOT BECOMING OFFENDED by bullshit, lying, and the corruption it often carries along. They even happily vote convicted corrupters into top offices. Now I understand a bit more--they simply never wanted to give me the satisfaction of knowing something they don't, cause I'm probably evil and want to take advantage of them.
Uh OH, are YOU evil? Have I given you THAT satisfaction?

I've been teaching the dumb sisters for 3 years. Dumb sister number one couldn't tell me what the verb 'to be' is,nor what verb it represents translated into Italian. Dumb sister number two cannot distinguish between single and plural pronouns nor am,is and are.Speaking English without using the verb to be IS very limited. I did look to other verbs, walk,play,draw,thing,learn,listen but these girls don't know those verbs either.
Luckily I have another student,Susanna who is very brava and passed all the diagnostic tests quasi perfectly, including the advanced english test.She meets me for conversation practice and we talk about her job,lovelife,and politics mostly. She works for the RAI TV world and is a journalist.She wants to improve her English communication because she has a boyfriend in Crete and they speak English together. Last night we discovered that Susanna did not know any of the names of household objects.She could discuss Jungian archtypes and dream symbology but didn't know how to say broom, coathanger,oven, pan, bathtub etc.etc. We had big laughs. Said I was going to obtain a catalogue from a wedding gift store, point to the objects and drill her on what they're called. These are my favorite lessons; when I am teaching someone the types of situations we use the present perfect tense to describe and discover that they still haven't learned how to say- nose, eye,hand, foot, mouth, hair.
Next week Susanna and I will study clothing terminology because she said it took her and her boyfriend two weeks to be able to discuss underwear properly.
I'm very much looking forward to a vacation.
I've been slightly depressed this week.
I've got a haunting feeling that there may be no solution to being female and not wanting men to draw all attention,sexual and otherwise, to themselves.
There will be the English Christmas plays at Gillian's school tonight. She has a bit role as a wench in 'The Emporer's new clothes'. Her buddy Nathalie, is the witch in Hansel and Gretel.I LOVE goofy school plays.I'll never forget Eric's appearance in 'Midsummer night's dream'...

the dumb sisters..
five minutes before I must scoot to the dumb sisters' house for their lessons. I don't like teaching the dumb sisters..the problem is the dumb sisters' mom referred me a smart student down the street and I can't abandon the dummies but keep the smarty, without seeming socially incorrect. I wish the dumb sisters' parents would give up on them learning English. This family is NICE but niceness isn't helping them learn how to learn, at all.
Maestro says I must give a recital on dec22. Making mistakes on Jingle Bells, Silent Night and Twinkle at age 43, in front of neighbors, is where a lifetime of being told I'm not living up to my potential has brought me. Maestro asked me today, WHY I want to study piano. He wanted to see if my aspirations coincide within his grand plan. Yes. Eventually I will be able to play a Bach Aria.

My Hell became a half a hell yesterday cause I split the stupid sisters' lessons onto different days.The younger stupid sister actually did the homework I assigned her and we began working with an excellent textbook which hopefully will help her.The older stupid sister maybe quite hopeless,but because she is quite stupid in all her subjects her stupidity doesn't reflect so poorly on me as a teacher.
Maestro Guido didn't like that I didn't bring all my easier piano books to lesson yesterday. He had only my second book in a series called Musicagatto to choose a song for me to play and that's where Jingle Bells was found.He grumbled several times that Jingle Bells is too difficult for me and I am determined to proove to him other otherwise, despite an F sharp,two chords and hand position changes.Last night I played Jingle Bells 100 times.Thank goodness I'm already a bit crazy cause Jingle Bells repeatedly would otherwise make me so.I've never liked Christmas much..Wordless Jingle Bells isn't quite as offensive, in fact anything played on the piano without lyrics is less annoying, with the exception of chopsticks.Think I'll study Twinkle Twinkle little star so Maestro might figure I'm ready to move on.
Pissing rain and Gillian didn't go to school. She hadn't done her geometry homework because she was so tired. Even though I attempted to wake her up this morning earlier so she could finish her homework. Leaving out the door she was sad and teary and I asked her if she was sad and she said she was tired and I told her she could stay home today and that I'd call the school and tell them she was sick, on the condition that if she stayed home, she would clean up her bedroom which only slightly worse than mine.She asked," Can I go back to sleep first?" " Of course". She was back in bed asleep before the count of two.I shut her light off and she is still sleeping.
I hurt Ippolito's feelings|ego? lastnight.I said that he'd woken early yesterday because Paola his ex girlfriend was supposed to call and come over to retrieve her refridgerator. But he'd made me coffee! he said, and had been up before me. He'd even wanted to bring me the coffee in bed, if only I hadn't gotten up and dressed because I had to go home to get my piano books and homework. He left my house looking like a spanked dog.He really had been nice too yesterday, he'd brought over a minestrone made from the all the frozen vegetables that had been in his ex freezer.I can be so cold...my only excuse was that as he has never once woken up to be with me in the morning, I had no experience, how could I appreciate a new field of which I have no experience? Maybe the stupid sisters feel that way about English lessons.
The smart girl, their friend and neighbor reminds me of my mother. There is something similar about their academic thrill,how they approach learning, determinedly, confidently, with pride.Both only children, they carry the swoop of household attention both in their aloneness and desire.
I'd like to not be so judgmental and analytical.Bites me in the bum.