2002-10-31 - 5:40 p.m.

Still at work on this fine Halloween. (I keep wanting to write Hollaween, like holla, cuz you know, when you have as many IM conversations as I do in the average day, you type the term "holla" a lot. Or "holla back holla back." This parenthetical is a total lie by the way. Part of it.) I'm so hungry. Good thing I'm going home soon. Wish there was a bit of candy around so I could spoil my dinner.

I resumed tutoring last night after a long hiatus, and the girls showed up but the boys didn't. Somehow I wasn't surprised. How do you tutor high school biology if you're not a biology teacher? (Or if the only bio class you've ever taken in your life featured the term "for non-scientists" as a sweetener and when you decided to show up to those lectures you ended up shuttling between your lecture hall and Lils's neighboring lecture to see which was more interesting on that given day.) These kids are failing tests based on the textbook, and all I could think of telling them was to study the textbook. Make flash cards or something, I don't know. You gotta memorize this stuff! Put your damn nose to the grindstone and stop IMing 718babythug69!

Math was a little better. I taught this sophomore how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide fractions. At several points I wish I could have downloaded and printed the representative pictures flowing through my brain that would just concretely illustrate the whole math dealy. Because these girls were taught just to copy parts of the textbooks and regurgitate. One knew y=mx+b and knew that m was slope and b was x intercept, but she had no clue what either of those terms meant. Frustrating, you know?

Ya heard?

Welp, happy Halloween and have fun at CMJ evemts and all that. Don't be surprised if you don't, though.