very, very miscellaneous

Today I feel like a grown up. I'm wearing a suit jacket, my hair down, and listened to NPR on the car ride in. They talked about Yassar Arafat dying early this morning. I was reading all about him on BBC and wondering what will happen now. That's when I found this:

Woah. Young Arafat was a hottie. Who woulda thought. Look at those lips!

Yesterday M. Curry the good ole ex-drama teacher, VP of the Gooch, and academic dean tried to call me about "something he's working on at the college that he'd like to know if I would be involved in." I left a message telling him that "this project seems interesting and mysterious" and tried to set up a phone-date with him. I'm really so glad that I might be able to help them in some way that isn't money. I hope it involves public speaking...or better yet, a dinner party!

I'm really in the mood for delicious cheeses today.

I just had to call a man by the name Jose Ramone. I wondered if it was Joey's Mexican Cousin...I wanted to make a joke, but I didn't.

"uno, dos, tres, quatro.."

okay, okay, the real post. Let's get down to business and stop posting pictures of dead icons and cheese:

Yesterday at tutoring Chelsey and I worked on reading and writing skills. She kept giggling at the idea of having to keep her lips closed when she read. She kept asking me why she had to read without moving her lips, And it was really funny, because I don't know why she has to learn this. It's silly, really.

I let her bring in her own choices of books from the library that she could read aloud to me and also read to herself and answer comprehension questions I asked. She chose three books, two were easy guide to white magic, witchery, and spells, and the last book was a teen-aged romance novel about this High school Wrestler who falls in love with his female opponent. Lots of rolling around on the mat there. She let me choose which of the three we'd read together. To avoid being blushy and embarrassed, I picked the Witchcraft books.

Reading out loud together I realized that a lot of her trouble comes in when she comes across a multi-syllabic word, she just rushes through it, not really understanding how to pronounce it, or what it means. So, we slowed everything down a few measures. We'd stop on a word I thought she might not know the meaning of, and we'd work though it. I'd let her tell me what it meant, but if she didn't know, I'd help her figure it out by the root word, or what it sounded like in the sentence.

I was a little worried about teaching her this sort of unscientific approach to learning a word you've never heard before, but I was pleasantly surprised when she went to write her own story (that I told her I'd proof for grammar, spelling and detail) she asked me for the big dictionary that no one ever opens at the center. The huge scary one, she used to run from.

The moral of the story is that if you let kids read books about witchcraft and sexy co-ed wrestling teams and let them write stories about their little boyfriend and how they are meant to be together forever they are more likely to want to learn the lesson you have to teach.

Chels was working on her story about her boyfriend. After the first draft I told her that her story had to be 6 full paragraphs to tell the story with as much detail as it needed. I don't think Chels ever wrote 6 full paragraphs. She wanted me to write a story about the big guy and how we met. She must be getting hormonal because she cried a little when she read it. She told me she was going to bring her story home and work on it. She was really excited to see how writing develops after more than one draft.

Last year at this time she was on a float in the Mayor's Christmas parade because she was the runner up for the Little Miss Hampden Beauty pageant. This year I asked her if she knew what a condom was. I was relieved when she screeched out "Eww Miss Jessica....That's disgusting."

Shelby, my other "study-buddy", when asked on a biology quiz where the female/male hormones were produced, she pointed to the elbow. He mother told me this with joy.

They both need help with their sentence structure and amount of detail when writing. I'm going to buy them journals "like the kind at Rite Aide?" their eyes lit up.