Is it week three already??

So very tired. I'm staying up way too late, not intentionally. Just bumming around at home until past an advisable time for someone who must rise at 6:00 a.m., then can't get to sleep. And then there's the anxiety. And the tachycardia.

A six-year-old girl told me her father has a ring in each nipple. Too much information! For both her and me.

Ms. L's habit of giving phonemes with an extraneous "uh" sound at the end (as in "mat: muh, aah, tuh") is driving muh-ee nuh-ts.

Public schools do way too much modeling of academic tasks. There's very little opportunity for kids to explore and test things out and get the chance to be wrong. Given that the expectations are already ridiculously low, it's no wonder that so many of them are bored. I remember chafing in silent frustration back in elementary school as the teacher went over the same obvious instructions again and again --- and I see the same boredom and frustration in the kids in Ms. L's class.

On the other hand, there's a couple of kids in there who seem lost. One of them almost certainly has some kind of disorder that prevents her from concentrating. Well, that's another problem in public schools, the insistence upon inclusion without regard to academic level.

Math was more pattern review, using geometric shape blocks. I encouraged the kids to avoid simple A-B-A-B patterns, and to decorate their patterns with more patterns. Some of them got really into it, using the blocks to build long bridges and hallways of patterns. It was fun for them and I was pleased to see so much inventiveness, but I'm pretty sure it's safe to move on now. They've mastered patterns.