Every Day a Day of Thanksgiving

I would like to make every day of November a day of Thanksgiving. I want to go to bed earlier tonight so I am going to try to make this brief. I've been listening to Ben Shapiro talking about Zohran Mamdani for longer than I wanted to. The truth is I miss Ben Shapiro. I used to listen to him on the radio on the way home from work every day. Then they substituted Guy Benson for him. I think Shapiro did more of the advertising than Guy Benson does. Commercials for this and that. I never know for what because I tune them out. I do. I don't listen to them. They annoy me. But yesterday, Benson had Shapiro on his show. It was great. I didn't tune in at the beginning though. If I'd have known he was going to be on the show I would have tuned in earlier. I have been missing Shapiro. Now, if I want to hear him, I have to go to I-Heart Radio or follow his podcast or something. I'm not going to do that. I remind you that I am the person who still watches VHS movies on a VCR. But I was delighted to hear Shapiro yesterday on the radio, and I get emails with links to his podcast or whatever it is, and I am thankful for that. I learned a new word in Spanish today: "Enfadado." My student told me it was the translation for "annoyed." I had suggested "irritado," but he said that wasn't it, even though it came up when I looked it up at home. At school, he had gone out to the staircase where the signal was better to inquire of Google Translate. Well, when I googled it at home I got "angry" for "enfadado." So, there you go. There are lots of words for that particular emotion. "Annoyed" is a word we use quite a bit in English. Maybe it's a bit of a weaker version of "angry." Is that possible? That word was in the context of something the kids have been reading. Chapters out of a book called "As Brave as You" by Jason Reynolds. I'm not a huge fan of reading excerpts from books, but I am learning a lot about what the standards are for kids and I enjoy teaching, so I'm a happy camper. I think my student is having fun too. He cracked me up while he was cracking up, laughing at me yesterday because I said Grandpop couldn't see and needed help walking because it was night time. And we both knew that the character couldn't see because he was blind. I was still thinking about how they had tried to decide how many stars there were in the sky. Grandpop obviously couldn't see them, but the two of them connected over that speculation. It was really a fun moment, actually. We have a lot of fun. That is just one example of how much fun I can have being a literacy tutor. I actually even have fun tutoring math up to about fourth grade math. I'm really no good at math, especially the way they are teaching it now, but it's part of my job so I do the best I can. I lucked out getting to help my no English-speaking student, so I didn't have to keep trying to learn fifth grade math. I'm thankful about that every day. Humor goes a long way. I'm going to close with this. Today I got a message from the assistant principal to stop by the office when I was finished with my second graders at 2:00. I had this conversation with my tutoring group about how I was in trouble and we speculated about what it could be and we had this moment about "Miss Carolyn has to go to the principal's office." It was fun. The kids were comforting me, saying, "I don't think you're in trouble," and anyway, I still have a certain anxiety about being in trouble. Isn't that crazy? I don't know if I should tell you my dream about the miniature reindeer. But I will. It was so amazing. It was either a young buck or a grown doe but it was about nine inches tall. It was so soft and liked to be picked up and it purred. I think it turned into a book at the end of the dream. Now, what do you think about that? Reminds me of the dream I had when I was a little kid about a little purple horse about the same size as that little reindeer last night. It was on my bed, maybe I can think up a story about the two of them. Well, I gotta be done now. I am kind of politicked out for the night. Beddy-bye time. I've been listening to country music while I've been writing, and it's been so much fun. I hope you have a good night. I plan to.