I think, if I were you, I'd make a complaint that a parent touched you without permission.

That's creepy. To be touched like that. I've been asked when I'm due a couple times, and at least once I was very smiley and chipper and said "oh! I'm just fat". Which is true and made the person look all embarassed.

If I could retake anything at any time with school it would be the testing I took to determine if I had learning disabilities. Mom found out after I graduated that the person giving the test transposed two numbers so it showed nothing was wrong in the scoring, when it should have shown I needed more testing.

That would have changed anything. I'm fairly certain I have some kind of difficulty when it comes to spatial things because that has always been beyond me. I remember struggle in fourth grade to understand volume, my teacher (thank god) finally got out things and showed me -- this is a gallon, this is a cup. Also not just volume but measurements.

If I could take a class for fun it would be a beginning drawing class with a good one on one tutor. Or maybe singing lessons. Something like that.

Right now I'm sitting at home trying to keep busy because SLBFNRLBF is off doing a training thing out of town and I'm lonely. Considering we're already 1300 miles apart it doesn't sound like a big deal, but we normally get on voice chat in the evenings, between eating dinner and taking care of chores and right now we'd be just chatting in Second Life or killing things in Anarchy Online. Or do something.

I think, if I were you, I'd make a complaint that a parent touched you without permission.

That's creepy. To be touched like that. I've been asked when I'm due a couple times, and at least once I was very smiley and chipper and said "oh! I'm just fat". Which is true and made the person look all embarassed.

If I could retake anything at any time with school it would be the testing I took to determine if I had learning disabilities. Mom found out after I graduated that the person giving the test transposed two numbers so it showed nothing was wrong in the scoring, when it should have shown I needed more testing.

That would have changed anything. I'm fairly certain I have some kind of difficulty when it comes to spatial things because that has always been beyond me. I remember struggle in fourth grade to understand volume, my teacher (thank god) finally got out things and showed me -- this is a gallon, this is a cup. Also not just volume but measurements.

If I could take a class for fun it would be a beginning drawing class with a good one on one tutor. Or maybe singing lessons. Something like that.

Right now I'm sitting at home trying to keep busy because SLBFNRLBF is off doing a training thing out of town and I'm lonely. Considering we're already 1300 miles apart it doesn't sound like a big deal, but we normally get on voice chat in the evenings, between eating dinner and taking care of chores and right now we'd be just chatting in Second Life or killing things in Anarchy Online. Or do something.

I came home early with the ick. I tried to give the germs away, but no one would take them.

I'd like a dance class. and a language class -- I had so many bad ones -- my ear is bad and I can't spell, but I was reading pretty quickly. I think it would be nice to be taught a language without intimidation

A writing class would be fun.

Class? Ooh, fun. I miss classes.

Mmm...Rebel Women Through the Ages. I'm still addicted to my bios of Millay, Parker, Georgiana, the Grand Horizontales, famous courtesans in other periods, heterae, Empress Theodora, Cleopatra, Mary QoS, Elizabeth...I'd love to write a paper and discuss and be intro'd to new ones.

A mythology class. Audit a basic Latin class, to brush up. French. Italian. Spanish. Anatomy. A good basic medical class. A history of medicine class. A good sociology class with a pop cult leaning. Screenwriting. Philosophy. A survival class. A anthro class that studied cultures. Zoology. Equitation.

Oh, so many thing I am curious about.

Oh, and vw? I have done that AND had it happen to me. I felt terrible both ways. Ughk.

Oh, beth-- sorry you've got the ick, too.

I'm not so much ick as I've got a major case of melancholia going on. It was a horrible day in publishing today, with a lot of announcements of consolidation and layoffs and such, and while in the long run, it'll probably be good for publishing as a whole, I can't help but be scared by the whole thing.

I mean, on the upside, I don't have anything in submission right now, so I don't have to worry about any projects slipping through the cracks or being thisclose to selling something, only to have the editor leave. (Which has happened-- twice.)

However, I do worry that what I've got simply won't be good enough. I know that's probably just an offshoot of "the sky is falling" but it's lurking and being pesky and the small sliver of my brain that isn't occupied with being depressed over the whole thing is pissed off and saying "Don't be an ass."

Feh.

Don't mind me. I'll be over the corner trying not to be a pathetic git anymore.

OK, question for the people who have trouble visualizing stuff: what helps? That sort of thing is one of my strengths, and when I'm teaching, there are certain topics where something just seems so obvious to me, because I can see it, but I can't get the students to see what I'm seeing. Like, there was a problem we were working on yesterday, where you had to take this bowl-shaped thing and cut a thin horizontal slice from it. It took a bunch of the students a while to agree that the thin slice would look like a ring, and I couldn't think of any way to explain it or help them see it. Anything that you can think of that helps you with that stuff?

Thinking of actual physical examples for context. Like you said bowl shaped and rings and my mind immediately went to Saturn's rings.

I have dyscalculia, Fay. Let me know what you find out. Math was always *such* a trial, and I didn't get the why confirmed till college.

Babe, I'm more likely to ask YOU for help. I mean, giving her physical stuff to work with is all well and good as far as it goes, but I'm floundering in trying to come up with ways to help her handle larger numbers, and grasp place value. Saying stuff like: "TWENTY plus ONE is TWENTY ONE. TWENTY plus TWO is TWENTY TWO - can you hear the sounds are the same? TWENTY plus THREE is TWENTY THREE. See, it's the same digit? Look at it! There's the two and there's the three - and there they are again, next to each other! So TWENTY plus FOUR must be...." And the poor kid just looks at me like I'm talking Swahili. Gah. Need better ideas.

Meanwhile, I've got Pun cheefully doing 428 divided by 4 in his head, just for fun.

Also - I want to do all those classes Erin just mentioned. All of 'em.

eta

Apropos of nothing - yes, I still fancy the hell out of Nigella.

sigh

I've had a student like that, Fay. I was sitting there saying, "What's one minus one half? No, don't put that into your calculator. One minus one half. You have one, you take away one half, what's left? You have one whole thing. You subtract half of it. How much of it is left?" And he just sat there, staring at me, bewildered. He tried throwing out answers like "one quarter" and "negative one," and it was clear he was just grabbing numbers from the air until something was right. And this was a calculus class.