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My Writing For Beginners prof is hilariously earnest and appealing. He wears ratty jeans and has a shaved head and is possibly younger than I am (god I hope not), and he is such a puppy. He believes really sincerely that if we read our papers aloud we can make them better. He is now explaining how we can make our sentences better by not using comma splices.

I am currently in a "Teaching English to High Schoolers" class where we are discussing teaching these issues (or, actually, slightly more complicated issues like parallelism) and he is doing a reasonably good job! He is only missing one or two techniques that might be effective.

I am very sorry for him because no one is matching his enthusiasm. I answer his questions having given the entire rest of the room thirty seconds of blank silence to fish for their own answers, because they should have a chance. I would like to pet him until he cheers up--he enters the room every day saying "Who's ready to learn?" (literally, out loud, like a game show host) and he just sort of gradually sags down a little more like he's been told he can't go for a walk every time he tries to invite participation.


He just added zombies and it didn't help the interest level. Poor little puppy!

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Minor headsup: So my darling, happymaking job is nannying two boys, two mornings a week, and I will probably want to prattle about them, because I DO THAT, so for future reference the 4-yo will be referred to as Jeeves and the 2-yo as Wooster.

Today Jeeves drew a picture of a daddy dragon and a baby dragon burping fire. I will not jinx things by mentioning the other things that happened today, but for the me looking back: lung power.

Today Wooster taught me the joy of train tracks and bumping six train cars off the bridge by adding just one more car.

Both of them re-taught me just how sticky grape jelly is. *still not entirely sure she's jam-free*