Story of the Day 10/ 5/ 2012

My daughter has been patiently waiting to get her Psychology paper back.

Sarah handed it in, a couple of weeks ago.
Most students are either eager or dreading it, because it will have this thing called a "grade" on the top of it.

This is not, however, the reason for Sarah's angst.

Sarah, unlike many high school students, has a tendency to choose the project that is the biggest, and most challenging.
Not just in her favorite class, not just in the class she does best in, not in order to pull up grade. She does it because she is Sarah and the idea of doing anything less is ..."boring".

As a result, whenever there is a project or a paper, she will have the entire house torn up.
We will need to make 14 trips to different craft stores or thrift shops.
She will need to get some strange text from a library no one has ever heard of ( the library, that s. And this library will be a 4 1/2 hour drive because it will not participate in interlibrary-loan); and she will need me to pay $49.95 a month, so that she can access tutorials on some strange computer program.

So far, at least, she has not needed to learn Croatian, wrestle an alligator, or fly to Brazil.
She is saving those projects for college.

At any rate, when she was assigned the paper for her AP Psychology class, she decided, amongst other things, that she would write her paper in dialect.
Southern, black dialect.

Now, for another student, perhaps, this would not be a major undertaking, but Sarah is deaf. Deaf as in doesn't hear and doesn't speak and has never heard.
She has not heard any of that elevator music, she hasn't heard the crowds cheering at the basketball games; she hasn't heard the fire alarms at her school, and she has never heard this particular dialect she has chosen to use for her paper...nor any other dialect, for that matter.

I said to her, rather incredulously, "But, how are you going to be able to do this? You have never heard that dialect."

Sarah looked at me completely non-plussed, and responded, "What difference does it make? I have never heard any dialects, I have never heard English, but I have to write my paper using that."

She has a point.

But she is, at the same time, wondering how her teacher will respond to this rather creative touch.