School: more than one climax a year

I haven’t been around here in quite a while. I’ve been very busy teaching 3 college comp classes, tutoring, freelance writing for text making companies (got fired by one! Poo!), stepping in as a proofreader at a local place, and teaching SAT classes. It was too much, but the money was nice. Next spring I will be poorer but less stressed. (The biggest insult was that while I was on vacation in New Mexico I continued working like a tornado for the company that fired me two days after I got back. Poo!)

I’m wrapping up the semester. My weakest class, the ones who got an extra class a week because they stink at reading even worse than the regular basic skills classes I teach, wreathed themselves in glory on the final. While only 3 people in one of the regular classes interpreted the essay they were given correctly, nearly everyone in the Weak Readers class got it bang on, as the brits say. The reason? We are asked to have a class period the day before a midterm or final in which the class discusses the essay the test is on, without any help from the teacher. My regular two classes were rather listless, but the Weak Readers were like pit bulls. They started off clueless, then kept arguing with each other and pointing out passages and demanding “why does she say that!!!???” I almost wept with pride, listening to them snarling and growling and chewing and over 80 minutes moving inexorably to understanding.

Ben has a girlfriend. She has EXACTLY the same sense of humor as he does. I am so pleased–it’s the first girl, so far as I know, who has returned his interest and has refrained from tearing his heart up into little bitty pieces. She’s also not a psycho, unlike the others. But, given how this world works, she does have one tiny flaw: she doesn’t eat meat, milk, eggs, butter, etc etc. I do cook vegetarian stuff a lot, but it’s sure hard without butter or cheese, etc.

Lady K. has a boyfriend too. Have I mentioned him? She took him to her father’s for Thanksgiving. She and Ben amused him, one hopes, ahead of time by imagining the different reactions he would get when the folks around the dinner table learned that a) he never went to college and b) is apprenticing to be a tattoo artist. Ben reports it wasn’t as interesting in reality as imagining it had been. Most (not all) of the relatives were polite.

I saw Chico and J, A’s sons, while I was in New Mexico. Both are darlings. Chico hypnotized me. Did I say this already? Oh, well.