Perspective

Work continues on the layout for Minstrels of Skaythe. I think I’m getting close. The tweaks are getting smaller and smaller, anyway.

Meanwhile, in school, we are past the honeymoon period at the first of the year. The kids’ natural resistance is beginning to unfold. Today was a day for all the kids to melt on their desks — either at home or at school — and whimper “I don’t know” for everything I asked. (Of course, they may also have been trying to hide that they had taken their masks off.)

Anyhow! My job is as a Resource paraeducator, Resource being the part of school that supports kids with learning disabilities. For a lot of the kids, writing is really the hardest subject. Even when I dictate a simple sentence, like “I love ham,” they struggle to get the letters on the page. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if they’ve tried and failed so much that they give up hope, or if they just don’t want to do the work and so they’re acting helpless.

Like a lot of writers, reading and writing came naturally to me when I was a kid. It is humbling to realize that what I take for granted is so difficult for some of the kids. I have to deploy many strategies to encourage them to at least try — even when they are melting on the desktop.

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