Wal-Mart Halloween

Halloween weekend, 2011.

Didn't plan ahead (as usual).

No room in the budget for costumes.

An unexpected refund in the mail.  Twenty dollars.

An unexpected half day of subbing for Tom.  Forty dollars.

Wal-Mart to the rescue.

Twenty minutes and sixty dollars later....

I no longer have one boy and two girls.

I have one werewolf, one cowgirl and one "Frankie Stein".

Thanks Wal-Mart! 

Why I Like Basic Writing Students

I really like working with basic writing students, for the most part.  I love their writing.  It is so raw and real.  Today, a student came in and asked me to proofread her essay.  She wrote about her mother.  She wrote about what it was like growing up with a mom who was the town drunk.  She explained how the kids learned to deal with their alcoholic mother's antics.  They would leave school for the day and head over to the bar, where their mother was on either her first, second or third beer.  They hoped to arrive sooner rather than later, so that Mom would only be on her first or second beer, and thus would be more able to communicate with the kids about their day, or their needs.  If she was coherent, she would take them to the store or take them home and they'd start their afternoon and evening. 

Mom was always in danger of losing her job, as you can imagine.  Things were really chaotic in this household.  Eventually Mom realized she needed to quit drinking, and she did, enduring three weeks of withdrawal.  At this point, my student writes that she had an epiphany:  "Mom needed something creative to do with  her time."   She wrote that she suggested to her mom, "Why don't you come to the school and help out in the classroom?  The teachers always need extra help."  She reported in her story that her mom actually took her daughter up on her offer, and showed up at the school, sober and ready and willing to help.  She never looked back.  She stayed sober and became an uber-volunteer.  She loved the school, the teachers and the students.  The teachers appreciated her.  The family lost their negative reputation in the town,  and the kids' lives improved immensely.  She talked about how proud she was of her mother.  This young lady had saved her mom's life, and she was writing about how proud she was of her mother!  I was moved by this girl's courage, and by her humility.

We worked on the essay and improved it, starting with spelling errors and moving on to sentence structure and paragraph development.  But I essentially told my student, "Overall, I would not change a thing about your essay's content.  I loved it."  She looked and me and said, "Thanks."   I said, "How is your mom doing now?"  She hesitated and then replied, "I'm a little sad right now because she died two months ago.  Today is her birthday." 

There are no words for a moment like that.  I was stunned.  How unfair!  I told her how sorry I was.  I said, you saved your mom's life when you were just a little girl. You did a very brave and wise thing.  You are very special.  This young lady just looked at me.  I could tell, just by looking at her, that life was still difficult for her, even though her mom had sobered up years ago.  Mom was now gone and she was on her own.  Her appearance did not indicate that her life was going swimmingly.  Here she was in a basic writing class, trying to gain full admission into the university.  Yet she was working hard, and doing her best.  In this one little essay, she captured what I might term the "anatomy" of growing up the child of an alcoholic.  How does one get over that?  What else was she not saying in her essay?  She did such a great job dissecting the subject.  And why not -- she was an expert in it.  She knew it from the inside out. 

During our meeting she exuded such tenderness, even though her edges were rough.  I think if you live long enough, God blesses you with chance meetings like I had today with this young lady.  Today, and on quite a few days recently, I feel incomparably rich.   

We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Programming...

I just read in a "book on journaling" that it's a good idea to keep a log of things your  kids said at the dinner table, as well as interesting things they've done.  We all intend to do these things, don't we?  We want to be good chroniclers of life events and "things my kids said" and we want to be excellent scrapbookers and excellent with the facebook postings.  But life goes by so fast for us, and I, myself, am not doing too well in this area.  So I decided that since I had a few minutes, I would just post a couple of things seen and heard around the Vogt house lately. 

Yesterday, Tom and I got to see Jenna at her sparring-best.  Tom took the "day off" from doing Children's Moments during the church service.  So Pastor Nick got the nod.  There was a small group of children and Nick had his hand-held microphone.  So he was asking the kids little popcorn-style quick questions.  Unfortunately or fortunately for him, Jenna was sitting right next to him on the stage and Matthew was sitting right next to her.  Poor Nick didn't know what hit him.  Jenna went toe-to-toe with him and even upstaged him a few times.  Tom and I were so proud of her.  Their back-and-forth "banter" went so quickly that I couldn't even take it down in shorthand.  Suffice it to say, our little 6 year old made our day.  Someone even stopped me in the parking lot and expressed her appreciation.  Thanks, Jenna! 

Recently the kids were doing their devotions with Tom.  Miss Erica writes the kids' devotionals, and now she is reviewing the Ten Commandments with the kids.   So as the kids were working on them the other day with Tom, and they were reciting the commandments, we were reminded of the very first time when the kids memorized the commandments.  Josh may have been six or seven years old; I cannot remember.  Anyway, when they got to the (fifth or sixth) commandment (not sure myself), Josh said, "Do not commit adoption."  We laughed so hard when he said that, but it was even funnier to report this to Deb, since she has gone through the adoption process for three of her kids.  She appreciated this one.  A lot.

Lastly, I was serving the kids a snack recently, and Kyle (age 10) was visiting.  Somehow we got on the topic of people's  names.  How sometimes a kid gets saddled with a weird first name or a lousy last name.  I said, "You know, you CAN get your name changed.  You don't have to keep it.  Does anyone know how to get their name changed legally?"  Kyle reported, "I think that you can, but I think you have to pay a lot of money and you have to get permission from, like, the President or something." 

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Writing Center Blues

I've got this crazy new job, working part time as a faculty tutor in the writing center at a local university.  There are a bunch of student (peer) tutors in there, along with a few of us faculty tutors, assisting students with their writing.  They bring in their essays and we go over them, reviewing them for whatever concerns the students have, and we offer suggestions as well as helping to review grammar and punctuation issues.   Some days I am really busy, seeing students every half hour, working nonstop.  Other days I sit there and drink coffee and read magazines or (sometimes) the Bible.  I get paid the same, whether I see 10 students or no students.  

This new milieu was a little disconcerting at first.  I am used to being paid to do...uh...work.  In my previous work as a medical transcriptionist, if I did not type, I did not get paid.  So this is a new one for me.  Overall, though, I'll take it, because I've gotten caught up on a lot of my reading.   I do feel this little nudge in my spirit telling me to read more of the Bible than of People magazine, though.  (guilt)

Anyway, we see mostly basic writing students, some of whom are still struggling with basic, uh, writing issues....on the sentence level.  We're talking "where do I put my commas?" and "Is this a run-on?"  And lots of poor spelling.  We don't see a lot of complex, deep, thought-provoking research essays. 

I have to say, though, that some of these students' essays/narratives have nearly driven me to tears.  Not tears of the "I can't take it anymore" variety, but the "oh my goodness, I can't believe you went through that tragedy" scenario.  Many of these students have had really hard lives.  I mean, some rough stuff.  Some of them are accepted into the university only on a provisional basis.  They have to pass this course in order to move on to regular freshman-level courses.  They don't even get credit for taking the course.    I'm not sure how they even graduated high school.  Maybe some of them just got their GED.  Maybe not even that.

Many -- maybe most -- of these students have had rough lives and have seen and been through quite a bit of devastating circumstances.  Basically, their presence at the university is a miracle.  My heart just spills with empathy for them.  How do they do it?  They have so many strikes against them.  I can just hope and pray and encourage them, even in the limited venue of a writing center.  I feel like the scope of my assistance is too narrow to be of any effect on them.   But I just keep plugging away at it. 

I write about the writing lab because I've realized during these last couple of months of sitting in the writing lab, that I'm not the only person who has gone through "stuff" in her life.  In fact, I'm beginning to suspect that my life has actually been rather easy, comparatively speaking.  It's a rather shocking realization, one that is just beginning to inch its way to the forefront of my mind.  It's like I'm coming out of a denial.  I'm still fighting it, okay?  So give me some more time.  Could it be -- no!  It can't be -- I've led a fairly privileged life?  I've had it pretty easy?  That may require me to admit that I've been, uh, complaining...grumbling...like the Israelites when they got sick of the manna that miraculously appeared to them every day.  Hmm.   

I keep thinking of the song, "Thankful."  Josh Groban sings it.  I'm not sure if he wrote it or if he just recorded it.   You hear it quite a bit while you're shopping at Dollar General or some other store during the holidays.  He ends the song, "There's so much to be thankful for."  I agree.  I've got an incredible husband, three amazing kids, a huge extended family, a decent job, a home, transportation, and an education.  I remember hearing a talk by Women of Faith speaker Luci Swindoll in which she said that if you have bought a book recently and could read that book, you were in like the top one percent of the world's population in terms of wealth.  So if you read a book and if you had the money to buy a book, you should consider yourself rich, comparatively speaking.  That'd be me. 

Now am I supposed to sit here and be defensive about my good fortune?  No, but I think it may be time to move on.  I don't want to admit this, but I think it is time to be done with my moping about some of the circumstances we've been through this past year.   Wallowing isn't what it's cracked up to be. 

I'm gettin' there.