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The Purposes of Instruction

Yesterday I had a student who worked very had and very well in our session, and so at the end I agreed to play Uno with him. I don't know why my students have a love affair with Uno but they do.

As we layed down our cards he said casually, "You bogus, man. You shot me down. That was bogus."

I glanced up at him. "Shot you down? What do you mean?"

"Las' year," he said. "I ask you out. You say no. You shot me down."

I rolled my eyes. "That was not bogus, you're too young. You're a student."

"That not stop other teachers," he said. I wondered if he was talking from his experienes within the district or if he actually went and researched teacher-student liaisons. If he did some research I'd actually be impressed. I was savoring a mental image of my student actually entering a library, removing a book from the shelf and opening it when he interrupted me.

"Besides, I 18 now. That a grown man."

"Being 18 is far from being a grown man," I said. "Besides, you're still too young and I don't date youngsters."

"Well, how old is old enough?" he asked me.

"Not eight years younger than I am," I replied.

"But next year I be 19, you be 25, that close," he said.

"No, no, I was 25 last year when you asked me. This year I'm 26. Next year when you're 19 I'll be 27."

The bell rang and he left, his mind boggled by the concept that I was aging at the same rate he was, and that no matter what he'd always be too young for me. When I was in college I knew I'd have to explain things like that to kids, but I never knew I'd be explaining it to fend off their romantic advances. Jeez.

I don't get paid enough.

In the beginning....

This-here is my opening entry. I'm a 26-year-old speech pathologist working in an urban high school in Illinois. I live in Wisconsin with my two cute cats and spend my free time with my books, my doodling, my friends, and my lovely boyfriend.

I'm also a refugee from Diary-X. Our server crashed recently and suddenly everyone found themselves adrift...I was going to avoid starting up a new blog and just wait for DX to get repaired, but they won't even have an estimate of the damage until the 20th. Even then the server's hard drive may be trashed and everyone's old journal entries may be lost. If my entries can be recovered, I'll go back. But if not, well, at least I already have something going here.

Anyway, regarding the name. I know Danulai is a pretty weird name for a journal but it's a name with a story. When I was a kid my mom listened to a lot of Fleetwood Mac, whose songs are not always the easiest to understand in terms of lyrics. At the time profanity wasn't much a part of my vocabulary, so when I heard the opening lyrics for the song "The Chain" I thought they were singing, "Listen to the wind blow, watch the sun rise. Break the silence, Danulah, Danulai." I figured that they were the names of two women, sisters perhaps, who were the main characters of this mysterious and beautiful song.

Nope. Just cussing.

Anyway, I later found the lyrics to the song and was slightly scandalized that my mom would listen to a song with swearing (I was even more scandalized when I got older and realized what the song "Second-Hand News" was really about). And since my two favorite pseudonyms (Indigo Jones and Lucky Haskins) were taken as Blogger names, I figured this was as good as any.

It's good to be blogging again.