day 11735: chain
Back in the day, at elementary school #5, we used to have to go to another classroom and grade the younger kids as they read to us from the Victory Drill (i.e. some strange Christian reading tool where you read as fast as you can for a minute and someone else listens to hear if you're pronouncing the words correctly, thereby ensuring that you move through the ranks of private school semi-literal). My kid could barely read, but the kid in front was a superstar.
I would never had thought of it, except that somehow this morning I started thinking about China, then about my trip to China, then about how Da paid hotel concierge to lend us their bikes so we could ride through the Chinese countryside, then about how we met up with my sister's grade 3 teacher in HK where we gave her a turbobroiler and she bought us some of those old handheld Nintendo beep-beep games and then about the old elementary school #5... and then somehow I started thinking about the Victory Drill and how they thought I was giving the kid low marks because I was being a bully to her, but in reality I could barely hear her, and she really was pronouncing the words incorrectly - which was probably because she was nervous and scared of me, but what the heck.... and why did I waste 10 minutes of my morning thinking and blogging about this in one really long run-on sentence?
4 comments:
I need to reconsider following this blog if you continue to drag up long buried trauma like this.
It sounds like you were lucky enough to be on only one end of that blue book.
You seemed to have escaped the tongue-tied racing against the stopwatch. And your quiet little reader probably at least had a clean desk afterwards. The drooling! The drooling!
Oh, and you meant semi-literate right?
literal... literate... I blame a certain spelling game, too many late nights and posting before my first cup of coffee.
Yes, I was lucky to be on only one end of the process. But that's what happens when you gone through as many schools as I have!
I'm sure literate sounds like literal in a British accent.
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