On Tuesdays, I write slices of stories from my week! All are welcome! Join us at Two Writing Teachers!
"I have to do this for every sentence?" N. said, his forehead wrinkled. While I miss seeing whole faces, the emotions people can communicate through the space between their nose bridges and hairlines is impressive.
"You do," I said. "Every sentence."
I was teaching N. a protocol for using talk to text. While I recognize the value of speaking thoughts and ideas, I also see the disasters of unplanned and garbled output. If he gets good at one sentence at a time, I'd open it up to two or three, but I wasn't going to tell him that yet.
He couldn't see me smile as he repeated his next sentence twice, then a third time with punctuation, and then record it.
He continued the process, and the next few sentences came out perfectly. When he played his piece back for himself, he was smiling, too.
"It makes sense," he said.
"Yeah," I said. I laughed out loud, so there was no missing my smile for N. "It makes a lot of sense."
