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January 15, 2004
Miscellanea
Hi Everybody! I'm not sure how many people everybody is at this time. I haven't actually told anybody where this page is except for the the link at tacosw.com. Unless you're looking for it, that link just kind of blends in anyway. Google hasn't even discovered this yet. Perhaps, it didn't notice the link. ;)
Well, I suppose I can talk about school. I haven't been working too hard, which is probably a good thing. I'm sure things will get more difficult as time goes by. Biology might be kind of tough, even though I'm just taking it pass/fail. Apparently, its one of the most difficult courses at Miami because they're trying to weed out those loser-wanna-make-a-lotta-money-goin'-to-med-school-freshmen-zoology-majors. Unfortunately, my lab partner on Tuesday was not particularly intelligent.
Today, I went down to tutor at Living Water. Instead of doing the usual homework help at the church, I helped the Hispanic students learn English (reading) at the school. Some of them seemed to be able to handle English just fine, and some of them insisted on gluing the pages of books together (these sets are not necessarily disjoint, there's some math terminology for you). They had three Macs in the classroom: an Indigo iMac and two older G3s. The students seemed to want to use the computers a lot. Perhaps, that is why computer distribution programs like the one in Maine have been so successful. The computers probably make work more interesting, even if it is just typing a paper. However, there are only three computers, so all the students can do is play educational games. We played a variant of Bingo (board game, not on the computers) where the squares each contained a letter of the alphabet. I would say the letter, and the students had to recognize it. The game was designed for teaching Spanish letters, not English (although I spoke the letters in English so the students would learn), so there were a couple Spanish-only letters tossed in there. I had to explain that the "Rr" card is referring to an English letter, but the "rr" card is referring to a Spanish letter (if you don't understand, don't worry about it). There was also another shape/color Bingo game that I had more difficulty with than most of the kids. I had to look at a card and pronounce its color and shape (like "Yellow Triangle"), and it always seemed to take a couple seconds to process the picture that I was seeing on the card. Maybe, I'm not accustomed to using that side of my brain.
Posted by doshirj at January 15, 2004 08:20 AM