Tuesday, July 27, 2010
LESSONS LEARNED
Our most recent in-class writing assignment was to write for ten minutes on the topic of lessons you learned in your early teens. This is what I wrote:
Mealtime when I was about 13 years old was sometimes an adventure, but there were lessons to be learned. My parents were separated at the time, and adult was never at home during the day. Consequently, meal decisions were made by my sister, Rita, or my older brother, Jack. My sister tended to favor a meal of canned tomatoes poured over noodles. It was easy, and she liked it. I learned to dislike this meal in silence one day when I expressed my disapproval, Rita broke a plate over m,y head. That had the anticipated outcome when I kept my complaints to myself after that.
Jack had a different appreciation of what constituted a decent meal. Sometimes when he was to prepare lunch for me and him, he would go over to the neighborhood grocery store where we could "charge" things and get a ten cent Frisbie pie and a pint of ice cream. He would divide it, giving me my half. That's when I learned about fractions. While I was not a good math student, it didn't take me very long to figure out my brother had absolutely no knowledge of the subject, because his half was always bigger than my half. Perhaps being older and bigger than I, Jack's mathematical calculations were flawed.
Mealtime when I was about 13 years old was sometimes an adventure, but there were lessons to be learned. My parents were separated at the time, and adult was never at home during the day. Consequently, meal decisions were made by my sister, Rita, or my older brother, Jack. My sister tended to favor a meal of canned tomatoes poured over noodles. It was easy, and she liked it. I learned to dislike this meal in silence one day when I expressed my disapproval, Rita broke a plate over m,y head. That had the anticipated outcome when I kept my complaints to myself after that.
Jack had a different appreciation of what constituted a decent meal. Sometimes when he was to prepare lunch for me and him, he would go over to the neighborhood grocery store where we could "charge" things and get a ten cent Frisbie pie and a pint of ice cream. He would divide it, giving me my half. That's when I learned about fractions. While I was not a good math student, it didn't take me very long to figure out my brother had absolutely no knowledge of the subject, because his half was always bigger than my half. Perhaps being older and bigger than I, Jack's mathematical calculations were flawed.
# posted by Noonski @ 2:48 PM 
