Swim

July 7, 2012

Maximillian got clearance to head back to the pool this week.  We didn't actually have the opportunity to practice the approach logistics repeatedly and to perfection like we did with rowing, but we had a theoretically sound plan and we did cover the details to the nth degree.  This included two separate store runs to find the appropriate swim sock.  Who knew you had to choose the correct psi (Pounds per Square Inch) when buying compression socks?  Probably everyone but me.

Everything worked out, and his sock did not absorb enough water to sink him.   Here is proof--the last five seconds of a fifty-five minute swim:

He swam for 55 minutes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, bringing a much needed change of pace to his daily exercise routine.  Really, how many times would you get excited about rowing the circumference of a rapidly shrinking 25 acre lake?  At one lap every twenty-five minutes, three laps per day, seven days per week, I would imagine the scenery would run out of oomph and visual delights fairly quickly.


Even better than the change of scenery was the triumphal return to the TAMU Rec Center.   

There may not have been antiphonal trumpets, but after eight weeks mothballed at home, Maximillian was happy to get back.  You could tell all his buddies had missed him.  They may not be a talkative bunch and they may barely know each others' names, but they've had neighboring lockers, shared swim lanes, and spotted each other in the weight room for thirty plus years.


By the end of the week, Maximillian began experimenting with partial weight bearing.  He weighed his foot and figured out what about 40 pounds of pressure felt like (stepping on it, not wearing it as a sock).  Now he is working his way up to supporting that much as he walks along.

Stink X 2

June 26, 2012


To paraphrase Lloyd Bridges, "Looks like I pick the wrong day to shower before walking the dogs."


Teddy, whom might more accurately answer to Ted-roll, discovered a renegade pony out on Charlotte Lane this morning.  Or perhaps I should re-phrase:  she discovered evidence of a renegade pony.  And took it as her obligation to roll vigorously in the evidence.   Don't you just love the smell of pony poop in the morning?  Nothing like it.


Nothing like it, that is, unless you can find skunk.


Which is what Willie did about fifteen minutes after the pony poop incident.


And where was my stashed supply of tomato juice that I keep for just such emergencies?  Sadly depleted.


So, I had to use tomato paste, of which I had copious amounts.


The tomato paste actually worked pretty well.  A lot like Prell.  A little goes a long way.  Of course, I didn't know that right away and plopped a big old tablespoon of tomato paste right on the top of his head and lathered it in.  I eventually covered him with about a half a can, which made him look like he had tried the mud bath at the "Red Clay of Georgia Spa."  Gradually, it started to cover up (absorb?) his manly, skunk odor.


I added some water from the hose to scrub the paste in and spread it around.  That's when he gave a mighty dog shake and then another and then another.  The carport and deck looked like a terrible crime scene.  I knew that NCIS's Abby Sciuto would need all her forensic skills to de-code the splatter pattern and explain what happened. 


Oh well.  I just followed the directions on the can (you know, "Wet. Lather. Rinse. Shake. Repeat.").  Now Willie is waiting in shame on the back porch, hoping to come back inside before the temps reach triple digits (and secretly hoping he can retain at least some of the cool smell he acquired this morning).


I'm headed upstairs for my second shower of the morning.

Little Shop of Horrors

June 22, 2012


I know that "Little Shop of Horrors" isn't a verb and, in fact, contains no verbs.  I still need to tell you about our most recent plague (Is this number nine?).

This is more than just an off-centered photo of our loft closet door that still has Erin-made art work on it and the scribblings of Erin and Ayesha pledging that they will be BFFL's.  Note the inexpert camera work of the vine sending its tendrils out in the very center of the picture.


I found this last week when I went to this closet to drag out the canister vacuum that I store there.  Yes, I had a Virginia creeper vine growing out of the loft closet ON THE SECOND STORY of my home.  It originated in the flower bed OUTSIDE the house AT GROUND LEVEL.


Inside the closet--alive and growing:

Notice how long it is?  Notice that it has insulation stuck to it where it grew through the wall?  


I want you to understand, that it is NOT the case that I rarely vacuum my house.  I usually use the upright, which I keep downstairs in a different closet (which for the record doesn't have Virginia creeper, or yaupon, or grapevine, or any other indigenous species of vine or shrub growing out of it and it better stay that way)!


I suspect that at least one of these two girls who celebrated almost all their birthdays together (Toni on Monday this week and Erin on Wednesday) would find my Little Shop of Horrors a riotous birthday present rather than a plague.

Hair for All Occasions

June 19, 2012


The first Davis Visit post.  It's all about the hair.


This is the hair that Davis arrived with last week:

He asked Jamie (our family stylist) for a "Mario Gomez" with a twist.  I'm thinking she probably didn't immediately call to mind the German striker, so he brought a pic along.

The twist he requested was versatility.  He wanted a hair cut for "Saturday Night:"

That with a part and some taming he could turn into a "Sunday Morning:"

I think he got the idea from Willie, who has very versatile ears:

Plague

June 13, 2012


It hasn't been "lions and tigers and bears, oh my" around here.  More like the first several chapters of the Ten Plagues of Egypt.  We started out the spring with more buffalo gnats than we could possible use in a lifetime, then churned, in sequence, through similar inundations of scorpions (tag, I'm it!), spiders (which have generated a persistent cobweb disaster in my not-sealed-very tightly country home), orange dog caterpillars, flying ants, flies (blow, bottle, house), and now, according to the local paper, we should brace for crickets.

What might follow?  I think I saw the sign of the seventh plague last night:  fast-forming thunderstorms with shifting, high velocity winds and other unpredictable weather patterns.

Davis's already long day (Columbus --> Newark --> Dallas --> College Station) grew by multiple hours  once he landed in Dallas.  He watched his departure time slip further and further into the evening; he boarded, unloaded, and re-boarded his Embraer RJ145, possibly multiple times.  He eventually took off on his final 45-minute leg merely three and a half hours behind schedule only to learn he had chosen the shake and shimmy setting on his aircraft.  None of that mattered quite as much as the repeat attempts to stick the landing at Easterwood Airport (each re-try banked him back up to circle the airport and stare wistfully out the window towards our house--an increasingly impossible goal to reach).

Here he is this morning (notice that his hair-raising flight had long-lasting effect), trying to come to terms with living through the Seventh Plague!

View

 June 4, 2012


Maximillian had his second post op visit last Friday (and no complaining from the peanut gallery about my slow update).  We were pretty sure he was healing and suspected they would pop him back into another cast after he had his x-ray.  We didn't actually guess that they would put him back in a cast and tell him they would take another look in three weeks.


Here's a shot of three of five of the healing incisions on the Frankenstein foot (with the swelling, he now has a regular width foot.).

Do you think he has a chance as a foot model?  I guess it depends on whether you need a "before" or  an "after" photo.

Here's the view from the inside.  The long piece by the heel is a bolt.

The next shot has the same foot twice.  You can see the staples and multiple screws.  I don't think I have a shot with the wedge, and the putty doesn't show up on x-ray.

In the meantime, I've been jet setting it and am still in DC trying to do all the good.  We had a very productive Project Collaborate meeting on Sunday and have some real meat on our efforts.  I even fit in a visit to my Congressman's office along with many productive conversations with various childhood cancer advocates.

Now, I'm trying to use my superhero powers to keep the Spurs ahead of OKC while live-chatting with Davis.  

I'll be home tomorrow to relieve the Eagle Scout who has been walking the doggies and helping Walter get down to the dock and back for his rowing.   

Row

May 30, 2012


Maximillian completed his third full week post-op and began his first week as an boatsman.  Cue The Smother's Brothers at the Purple Onion--1965 (you can hear it all starting about halfway through this clip:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3yEDLSOKYI), where you can hear Tom preface the track "Dance, Boatman Dance" with an eccentric comment about the seafarers who “go into town and pick up their oars.”


NOTE:  This is NOT an appropriate entry for America's Funniest Home Video.

He looks so serene, and I imagine the whole experience must feel really liberating after 19 days of bed to bathroom, bathroom to recliner, recliner to kitchen table, and kitchen table back to bed.  And that is the benefit of planning!

And when I say planning, I mean Black Op-level planning.  We spent last weekend doing reconnaissance and considering supplies, technology, and equipment.  We mapped and re-mapped access routes and spent just as much time on the return route.  We broke the process down to stages and phases and practiced them in the living room.  Then we did a dry run:  out the back door on crutches, transfer to wheelchair, across the porch and deck, through the carport, down the ramp, through the yard, over and around various cypress knees, and we finally made it to the dock.

Transferring from the wheelchair to the boat required the most planning and practice, but the advance work to stage all the equipment was substantial as well.  

Maxi will have his foot x-rayed on Friday and we will know a little more about what his roadmap looks like.  I'm hoping for at least a skosh more weight-bearing.  A good report from the doctor will lighten my guilt for leaving town Saturday as I head to DC to do a little business in the childhood cancer world.  

Learn

May 25, 2012


You learn so much when you have to take over someone else's responsibilities.  I have depended on Maximillian for years, actually decades, to change the air filters for the A/C system.  Today he supervised and I did the labor.  He does this every month.  I can only imagine what the filter would look like if I had been in charge, because if the filter can trap that much dust in a month, imagine how much would be there if you waited 29 years.


And apparently, I'm not capable of preparing the dogs' breakfast. . . at least according to them.  There are written instructions.  I follow them to the letter.  And yet?  It just doesn't taste the same.  Everyone picks at their food and leaves more than half before discouragement sets in and they wander off in hopes of a better menu elsewhere.  Well, that's not exactly true.  Uma has eaten it all, every day but the one day she had a stomach bug and left evidence of the malady on Walter's office floor.  But Uma doesn't really count because she is like Mikey from the Life cereal commercial:  she'll eat anything.


What else?  


The dishwasher doesn't breakdown or even protest if you run it more than once a day.


Pomegranate juice costs much more than you expect.


If you want the figs to ripen, you have to water every other day.


You never really understand how many glasses of water a 200 pound man raised in the desert drinks each day, until you have to bring him each glass.  I have started leaving them in strategic spots around the house like Hansel and Gretel leaving bread crumbs on the path.


It's really impossible to walk the dogs as much as they prefer.


The sounds of crutches moving slowly and methodically around a house would be an excellent way to create suspense and terror in a horror movie.


Screws, Bolts, and Staples may be in Maximillian's right foot, but it would also be an outstanding name for a rock band.


Sleeping alone is overrated.

Stylin'

May 18, 2012


I had a very good day.  We celebrated my friends Shirlene's and Lisa's birthdays at Christopher's (surely, I  misused my apostrophe key at some point in this sentence).  The really cool thing was that our server was talking about our table back in the kitchen about how she was getting to serve the table with the "fun ladies."  Another server came out to see who we were, and it turns out he was our server last year.  He was very jealous!  We, on the other hand, were just sated.


Maximillian had his first follow up doctor's appointment since his surgery.  Unexpectedly, his Five (5) incisions had healed enough that they removed his stitches and put him in a fiberglass cast.  He still has zero-weight bearing instructions (which believe me, is very inconvenient), but at least we know that his big toe is aligned with his nose and he is improving.


Zero-weight bearing has real consequences.  For one, you can't even carry your own glass of water to wherever you want to drink it (unless where you want to drink it is right by the refrigerator).  When you move from place to place, you are limited to whatever you can put in your pocket, whatever you can balance on your head, or whatever your friends and/or relatives will carry for you.


Maximillian was okay with that at first.  A couple of days after I DC'd his IV nerve blocks he started using his On Q carrying bag (without the little grenade-shaped nerve block device inside) to carry his Blackberry around his neck as he moved from room to room.  

But every day that passes, he wants to carry more things.  So, Maximillian asked me to find him a bag big enough to carry his phone and his nook tablet and his miscellaneous stuff.

The solution?  Look through Erin's vast store of purses, bags, and carryalls.  I found the perfect pouch:  just the right size, just the right strap, just the right features, just the right color.  Whenever Maximillian wears it he is inspired to "suck it up" like Erin always did and charge forward.

Of course, it helps that it matches his ensemble, and makes him a a styling' guy.

Creep

May 17, 2012

Do you remember $10,000 Pyramid (or $25,000 Pyramid or whatever it got up to with inflation)?  The premise of the show, hosted by Dick Clark (and now we know the Mayans were right about the world ending in December 2012, because he won't be here to rock in the new year), was that contestants paired with celebrities tried to guess a series of words or phrases based on descriptions given by their partners.  Of course, there was the mandatory ticking clock with a pretty short time limit.  And of course, the "big money" phrase was always a lot harder than the earlier ones.


So I think Walter and I could win the "big money," especially if the clue were Things That Are Slow.  


I might start with the coy clue of "day after the MLB All-Star game."  Look it up.  It is historically the slowest day in sports.  I might ramp up to "three-toed sloth," then throw in the teaser of Chuck Berry's "My Ding-a-Ling," purportedly the slowest single to climb the charts to #1.  But we would clinch when the clock was almost down to zero by offering the clue "Healing from Complicated Foot Surgery."


This just does not go fast.  In fact, it's kind of like this (watching pain dry), only less fun:

Scoot

 May 12, 2012


Maximillian made it outside today for the first time since Wednesday morning, save for the transition from the hospital to the van and the van to the house on Thursday.


No marathons or dance halls yet, and this sweet ride doesn't work that well in the house because our floor plan requires a smaller turn ratio.  Still, its good to see him upright (which is what all the cool chicks say about their men).

Home

May 10, 2012


Home doesn't often operate as a verb, but sometimes it just becomes one and reverberates until it has your attention.  Maximillian made it home from the hospital around 2:00 this afternoon, and that's the way it felt to him.  

I need to get out and walk Willie and Teddy between rain showers, but I wanted to demonstrate Nurse Teddy and Nurse Willie skilled nursing techniques.

I also wanted to give you another opportunity to participate in the health and maintenance of Maximillian's foot.  Let me introduce Maximillian's two new best friends, as shown in the above photo with Willie.  They don't yet have names.  Maximillian suggested Heinrich and Fredrich to keep with the teutonic theme.  I thought he might name them Mitt and Barack, so he could remember to use one in his left hand and one in his right.  Any other thoughts for crutch names?

Wait

May 9, 2012


Adult hospitals just don't have much advantage over children's hospital (except the definite all-time best thing--that they have many fewer sick or injured kids).  The pre-op room did not have awesome toys for Walter to ride around on while he passed the hours.  Nor did I have a soothing rocking chair to still my nerves.  There were NO adult life specialists circulating with art projects or blowing distracting bubbles.  I guess on the up side, CNN rather than Dora, the Explorer provided the soundtrack to my afternoon.


The worst difference was that I don't have a trustworthy nurse phoning out to the waiting area every two hours, giving me the update.  In fact, it is almost 5:00 and I haven't talked to a nurse since 12:30.  I'm pretty sure they won't have Gatorade and purple popsicles in recovery.  


For those following the action, here is a pre-procedure photo of Maximillian's size 13B prize right foot.

Nurse

May 7, 2012

I don't mention Walter very often on this page, except to point out how remarkable he is and how much I love and appreciate him.  I think he glances at the page from time to time, but only when he is extremely bored.  That (my mentioning him, not him reading Let's Do It!) may change in the next couple of days.  Walter is having foot surgery on Wednesday, and I'm reprising my role as tertiary house nurse (supporting Head Nurse Teddy and 1st Assistant Nurse Willie).  I hope to negotiate a deal with the patient, where I can share endearing and perhaps humorous tales with the public, without stretching the matrimonial pledges of trust too much.  What a great way to kick off National Nurses Week! 

Or perhaps I would be on safer ground if I proposed to you that from time to time this summer I will publish a fictional account of imagined encounters with an unknown person (perhaps I will call him Maximillian) recovering from a non-specific malady who has very limited mobility.

Here's an installment:

In anticipation of having at least ten weeks of non-driving and an uncertain number of weeks out of commission at the gym (did you know that Maximillian was a seven-day-a-week workout guy?), Maximillian bought a rowboat (do not think I mis-typed the phrase rowing machine) to attempt to get some cardio in while he recovered.  Now we just have to hope that he gets back on his feet and into the gym before drought conditions re-emerge and the lake disappears again.

Here are your two assignments until the next post:

1. Maximillian's rowboat needs a name.  Please suggest your first choice.
2. If you have had foot surgery, give me a hint what I might expect.

   

Sleep Less

May 4, 2012

Of all the things I imagined about Wednesday night, waking up at 1:08, screaming, grabbing my back, and stripping my pajama bottoms off were not among them.

Now, I am left to ponder how I could have possibly angered the gods so much that they would have slipped a scorpion under the covers and down my pants right in the middle of my RIM sleep pattern.

 
You can tell this is not the scorpion that stung me four times in the small of my back as I slept.  For one thing I would have photographed the real scorpion on my Rembrandt rose colored Lands End sheets, not the stucco pictured here.  For another, my scorpion would have looked much flatter, smashed over and over in my frenzy by Walter's size 13 shoe until it lay in unrecognizable small clumps on the floor.

Lest you worry, the damage from this incidence is minor, except for the lost sleep (which is inevitable, because really, who wants to get back into bed after this happens?  At that point, there is no end to the places where your imagination takes you--though in honesty, all of them involve feeling small things crawling across your skin in places you can't see or reach.).

I have to say that I was mightily disappointed in Teddy, the guard dog, who has made the case for the last three years that she deserved to sleep IN THE BED with me and Walter so she can PROTECT US AT EVERY TURN.  I don't think she woke up until after I had stripped to the buff and pounded my assailant into paste.

I also mentally composed a letter of apology to my mother at some point as I sat in my sleepless state waiting for the morning to come.  Years ago, she was stung by a scorpion while gardening.  I won't describe in detail where she was stung, but you can form your own mental picture by imagining a scorpion in the grass swinging its barbed tail up to sting someone squatting to pull weeds.  I believe I had learned in Girl Scouts that the appropriate first aid for scorpion stings required a tourniquet between the sting site and the heart.  And I always founded it incredibly funny to remind her that it would have been nigh impossible for her to follow that advice.  Now it doesn't seem funny at all.

   

 

Present

May 2, 2012

Allow me to present Elizabeth Bustos, the 2012 Erin Buenger Scholarship recipient!  She wants to study early childhood education and her teachers rave about her--not just her academic success and the host of activities she is involved in, but about the strength of her character.   

Organize

April 28, 2012

This is not a store display.  This is a small section of Erin's room.

Thanks to my uber organized sister Kat (who would be OCD about organizing, but refuses on the grounds that OCD isn't in alphabetical order), the bulk of the seed beads donated by Jennifer Fountain at the end of last year and sitting in a jumble in a cardboard box since then, are now ready to go for the summer lanyarding season!

Do you feel your creative juices flowing?

Learn by Reading

April 25, 2012

Things I learned from reading this week:

From The Economist

 According to a report from the Congressional Research Service, there were 294 million guns in the country in 2007, up from 192 million in 1994. More guns might be expected to mean more influence for the N.R.A., except that the number of households with guns has actually declined fairly consistently since 1973. The people who buy guns, it seems, are usually those who already own them.

*****************

From The New York Times

Plato was an athlete, particularly skilled as a wrestler. His given name was Aristocles, after his grandfather, but the coach under whom he trained is said to have called him “Plato” — from the Greek for broad, platon, on account of his broad-shouldered frame. It stuck.

*****************

From The Atlantic

State tax codes have a way of accumulating junk -- quirky breaks and carve-outs that grow increasingly odd as they linger on the books, like tacky old legislative souvenirs. In Alabama, you can still deduct $1,000 for building a radioactive fallout shelter. In Arkansas, blind combat veterans may buy a new car every two years tax free. In Hawaii, residents can claim a $3,000 deduction for taking care of "exceptional trees" on their property -- as long as an expert deems them "exceptional."

One of the strangest?  Florida's greenbelt law, which gives significant property tax exemptions for preserving green space areas.  The way to prove you deserve the exemption?  Rent cows for your lot and pay significantly lower taxes.

 
*******************

And these contrasting quotes from the Herding Cats blog

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science — Lord Kelvin

We contrast that with Einstein quote

Not everything that counts can be measured. Not everything that can be measured counts.

Compare/Contrast

April 18, 2012

A quick glance at my bookshelf in the left column reveals some that I have had going for quite a while and a couple recently added reads.  I don't know if you know Wilkie Collins or The Moonstone.  I didn't.  First published in 1868, folks who more in the know than me identify The Moonstone as the first detective novel.  It also has the quirk of telling the story through the eyes of several different characters, over time and in different countries.


I'm in the part told by the house steward, a seventy-something family servant named Betteredge, and given the pithy asides he adds to his storytelling, I would say that I'm not he first to notice that he is aptly named.  He also has the habit of dipping into Robinson Crusoe when confronted with a problem, needing wisdom, or just looking for comfort.  I found that funny and endearing enough to tell the Sunday school class about it on Sunday.  Of course, some people do that with the Bible, which I guess is the point, and also why I brought it up in Sunday.  


As soon as I set it up and delivered the part about about Betteredge consulting Robinson Crusoe for divine insight and had worn out eight copies over the years, my good friend Bill jumped in and said,  "My mom did the same thing with The Count of Monte Cristo."  I didn't believe him, but he insisted it was true.  Do you think this is as funny as I do?  I mean, it was funny for a made up eighteenth century servant with little education to consult a work of fiction for sustenance, but I have laughed every time I have thought of an actual 21st century woman dipping into The Count, just like Walter's grandmother relied on The Bible.  I have also added Robinson Crusoe and The Count of Monte Cristo to my future reading list, just to see what the buzz is.


Speaking of grandmothers (that wasn't a very clever segue, was it?), Walter's grandmother not only consulted her Bible, she took it another step.  Apparently, she got a new Bible every year, read it cover to cover, annotating heavily as she went.  At the end of the year, she would put the Bible in a shoebox, tie it up with a ribbon, and stack it in the closet (never to be viewed again).  When she died there were layers of boxes lined up on the shelf in the closet.  His other grandmother (maybe great-grandmother, I will have to check) was a Freethinker (if you don't know what that is, you should look it up).  When Walter's dad went to her to explore the idea that he wanted to be a minister, she listened carefully until he was done, then sent him on with the advice that went something like "Why don't you find honest work?"


My grandmothers were just as different.  I grew up thinking of them as the "cooking" grandmother and the "playing" grandmother.  I think that is a little one-dimensional of me, but I do think, like Walter's grandmothers they represented somewhat distinct points fairly distant from each other on the grandmother continuum.  


I can remember my mother's mother loving to play canasta and bridge (I was taught bridge as a ten-year old so she and my mom and my aunt would always have a fourth).  She could keep the conversational ball rolling with anyone.  I have a fixed memory of her stretched out in front of the huge black and white console television, working out with Jack LaLane.  She liked the horse races.  The only thing she could cook that I remember enjoying was "Sock-It-To-Me" cake.  Everything else was a disaster.

My father's mother was a cleaner, from cleanersville.  When she visited, I had to sleep on sheets and pillowcases that she had starched and ironed.  By the time she left my cheeks were rubbed raw.  The upside to her lengthy visits was that she cooked a full hot lunch every day and we all came home from school and work to eat.  She sewed me so many dresses that when I started first grade I didn't repeat an outfit until October.  


When I was young I just thought of them as work v. play, but my "work" grandmother also taught me to play poker and honed my skills until I was pretty scrappy.  She'd fly kites, fish, and work jigsaw puzzles with me--everything was very Vickie-centric. This was different from my other grandmother, who made no real effort to endear herself to me on my terms.  I think she was much more adult-oreinted, and it pleased her to no end when I finally caught on to her bawdy jokes and her clever charm.


In hindsight they were a contrast, just not the contrast I grew up thinking I understood.

Write

April 4, 2012

Writing fascinates me.  

Usually.

Except, of course, when it irritates me.

I have writing on the brain.  I think it's because I have graded non-stop since the week after spring break and see little respite on the horizon.  Not all students write badly, but enough do that I'm tempted to despair.

I constantly seek ways to support students' writing.  I start with the obvious:

FD FC (First Draft Doesn't Equal Final Copy)--although, admittedly, in blog writing, sometimes it does.

I introduce them to the Seven Dwarfs of Bad Writing:  

Choppy
Clunky
Sloppy
Wordy
Fuzzy
Trite
Boring

I warn them not to pull a Snow White and set up housekeeping with these bad influences.

I give them general advice and specific guidelines.  I point them to writing experts at the University and in the public domain (for instance, Constance Hale on sentences.  She begins, "I like to imagine a sentence as a boat.").


Mainly, I wonder about their previous writing instruction.


Teaching writing is just not held to the same standards as the other two Rs (readin' and 'rithmatic).


Educators attack the process of teaching reading.  We have multiple methods and a huge number of weapons in our arsenal:  phonics, "look & say," language experience, context clues.  Teaching reading is designed to span the entire range of intrinsic capability and interest.  Once a student can read Hop on Pop, teaching doesn't stop.  Even if most of the class is still "sounding it out," other kids move on to chapter books, literature, and discerning reading (which means you figure out that you don't read the newspaper the same way you read your favorite blog or your chemistry text).

Math is much the same. No one expects everyone to learn in the same way or at the same pace.  Students who master basic operations go on to algebra, geometry, and beyond.  Others get more practice on the basics.  Teachers differentiate the curriculum and there is always more to learn for everyone.    

I wonder about writing instruction.  Do instructors meet every student where they are?  Do students who figure out basic sentence structure get channeled into more challenging writing opportunities?  How much effort goes into remediation?  Is there an armada of opportunities to figure out a range of writing skills and strategies?

When I read my students papers, it feels like everyone has had exposure to writing instruction, but at some point (8th grade, maybe?) their writing became frozen in time.  Somebody signals that is good enough (and from my vantage point the bar here is pretty low) and then everyone stops progressing.  So I'm faced with college students and even college graduates who write by formula, who can't discern the appropriate type or style to adopt for any writing opportunity, and who really haven't explored the concept of writing beyond trying to avoid it.  I think that many of my students believe that writing is an innate skill/gift that you either have or you don't, and that if you are a "bad" writer there is no hope and if you are a "good" writer you are a lucky dog and don't need any more instruction. 


That drives me crazy.  They are wrong.  They need to learn and then practice what they learn.


For the record, if you work at it, your first draft could should look like this: