The Burrow

We met when I was coming out of hibernation.  My only job was to heal , and so I lay on Douglas, the couch, for 14 weeks, watching the sun move across the horizon as the days and months passed.  Getting up and getting out was a major production, especially once my Suzi-Sitters were gone.  I needed help at every piece of the process - off the couch, over the thresholds, down the path, into the car (somebody do something with my assistive device, please), being driven and then reversing the process to arrive at my event. The event had to be something really worthwhile.   Showing up at Prince Elementary School to judge children's photographs was really worthwhile.   I fell in love... with the school, with the kids, and with the Assistant Principal, Tanya Wall. I don't usually include real names in The Burrow.  Blogonyms are used to protect the innocent and the guilty alike.  But this is different. This is a tribute to a Wonder Woman, a Kindness Crus...

https://tinyurl.com/lelwng9 Remember the first time you saw this? You saw what you saw.   Then, someone said she saw something else. Really?   Yes, really. Hmmmmmmm..... I worked in the Reading Lab today with a young man who zipped through the assignment in record time.  We looked on the bookshelves for inspiration. The O Volume of the encyclopedia was of marginal interest (notwithstanding the orangutan and the optical light telescope). The Book of Minerals made for interesting reading (aloud, by me, which was hardly the point of our time together) and picture gazing and a semi-scientific explanation of prisms. The Science Explained book brought it all together in the section on optical illusions. He'd never seen the Rubin Vase before.  Ours were blue and gold, but he saw the faces and I saw the vase and neither of us were quite able to see what the other saw.   It got better. brucepurdy.com There was a ruler in the cadd...

"I learned something right now.  I don't usually learn something but I learned something right now." Thus spake a 2nd grader, a young man who was working on distinguishing between the long and short vowel sounds.  We read the often used words as I tried to find examples of that-which-passes-for-rules in spelling the English language.   Two consonants after a vowel make a short sound (except when they don't) was simple enough, and so was an e at the end of the word makes a long sound. It got tricky when we got to cage and case and mice and nice.  That c  is quite a problem (as was quite,  but we'll get to that later.)  If it's cage and case why isn't it mike and nike?  The e at the end of the word was the clue, and his face when he realized that the e at the end makes the c an s  lit up the classroom. That's when he decided he'd learned something.  He went on to zip through the ce  words, and enjoyed the story to which they we...