Have a Good Weekend!

I worked with a student this morning who has learning disabilities. He has trouble with words that sound similar. I can't quite figure out if the best way to help him is to sound out words, or sort of draw visually the difference between certain words, or what, but for now there are just some sounds he genuinely cannot tell apart.

Beyond that, his teacher has a terribly disgusting habit of crossing out his words and putting in things she thinks would sound better. Like he wrote, "to answer Gladwell's question," and she crossed that out and wrote, "in answer to Gladwell's question." What the heck? We were finishing up his paper and he just had to finish his conclusion. He was having trouble rephrasing his thesis statement, so I suggested looking at the assignment to see if he could glean any language from there.

He said, "Man, I don't want to use her shit!" Haha! I love that, troublesome and difficult though it may be, he feels ownership of his words and wants his paper to reflect his thinking.

The second student was a mess. I asked him for his assignment sheet, and he started pulling random things out of his backpack. A math book. Headphones. Finally, he extracted an enormous pair of blue brief underpants and pulled a wadded piece of paper from inside them. This was his assignment sheet. He slid it across the table and told me I could photocopy it if I wanted to. I said, "how about you put it in the machine and I go get you the Windex?"

He looked at the underpants and just said, "Aw these are clean! I got to have fresh ones for after practice. You know how it goes!" I still made him be the one to place the paper in the copier.