Mental Health Day

Thankfully the weather's supposedly warming up. We'll be up around 50 now for three or four days. Yay! And Sue is taking a vacation/mental health day today (one of her super-precious ten vaykay days), and maybe she'll be able to donate platelets, as long as her iron's up to snuff.

Yesterday evening I served for the fifth time as a study buddy/homework helper at the local high school. None of the students in this after-school program are native-born Americans. Here's a run-down of what I've seen and done.

DAY 1
I assisted a high school junior with an application essay for a local foundation's scholarship program. If the application was successful, the foundation would provide scholarship aid as long as the applicant gained acceptance to an accredited four-year college in the meantime. The essay was to describe an obstacle overcome. The student confused me with one sentence in particular: "I was shy, and I had mad absan in my mouth." By the end of the hour, we had worked together to figure out that absan was accent, and the use of mad was probably not appropriate for a formal essay. I mentioned this before: the student had appeared on the school's honor roll in the previous quarter.

DAY 2
I worked with a junior on another application essay. The topic of this one was, why I want to go to college. The student was trying very hard, but had difficulty with composition. For example, the student explained (paraphrase), I want to go to college, because "I want to have a good work." The student wanted to become an electrical engineer in order to fix things.

I also helped a student write variations of sentences relating to a movie the class had seen about slavery. The student had to use key words and, at one point, confused the meanings of prerogative with rape.

DAY 3
I was not paired with a student.

DAY 4
I helped a student write a report about the class' visit to the Jewish Heritage Museum. Bulb light was changed to light bulb. We also worked to clarify the student's memory about the practice of halitzah.

Going back to Deuteronomy (25:5-9), when a married man dies childless, leaving an unmarried brother, the brother is obligated to marry his widowed sister-in-law. The rationale for what was called a levirate marriage was to continue the name, the assets and the soul of the deceased brother through the subsequent marriage and children.

DAY 5
Yesterday, I worked with a student who had an infant (guessing, six-month old) child in the classroom. The student needed help writing a paragraph including transition words, first, later, finally, and then reading. The student exhibited difficulty with sounding out words phonetically.