Today is cool and beautiful with lots of sun. Mother Nature is garbed in her best for this weekend. Tonight, though, will be cold, in the high 50’s. I figure it’s a dress rehearsal for what’s coming.
My street has close to a million kids 10 and under. Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration, but this morning that’s what it sounded like to me. They woke me up before eight yelling to one another, and I think I heard one crying. I drifted back to sleep only to have them wake me again. That went on until 10 when I decided I’d get up. Every day the kids ride their bikes up and down the street mostly for the fun of it. The street is a good one for kids on bikes as it has little traffic. I’m just wishing the bikes came with muzzles. Now, of course, the kids are gone so the street is quiet. I guess they figured everyone’s awake now so their jobs are done.
Learning kids’ names was always one of the first items on my agenda when I was teaching. I wanted to address each kid by name instead of using the proverbial you or the pointed finger. I had five classes of names to learn each semester and I did. In Ghana the learning was complicated by the names and how to pronounce them. Abibata Abdulai and Bintu Liman were a couple of the more difficult names to remember. Fatima was pronounced as fa teem ah. Old-fashioned names were popular. Faith, Hope and Charity were common. Florence, Beatrice, Agatha (a ga tha) Rose, Grace and Regina, pronounced the Canadian way, were also common. It took me a bit longer to match names to faces.
My dad was great remembering business names and details but was never good at other names. I figure his head just didn’t have the room with everything else he remembered. I had two friends with Polish last names, and he never got those names right. One he called the Pole, and the other he never called anything except she or her. I don’t even think my friends noticed.
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