As we enter the new era of covid learning, it is clear that students and teachers alike are looking ahead to the new classroom year with trepidation. While no one enjoys the thought of change, we humans are adaptable and will survive. What hasn’t changed for over 200 years is the physical classroom and the way we teach, even as technology has changed so much of the world around us. Sometimes it takes a catastrophe to allow us to see the benefits of things that were right in front of our noses. Here is an audio intro to the benefits of learning in a virtual world that is driven by the need to communicate at a distance.
Let’s go 40 years into the future and meet Tom a student who is on his way to school in his local PEA (personal education allocation).
Selling the Secure Learning Environment
While it may seem important to teach children about big data and the threats to privacy that this may have on their future, a private school have control over data that predicts a person’s likelihood to succeed. If private school’s control the important predictors of our future lives, can we trust them to care for it?
Semper Securitus
As teachers, we often sit in the staffroom and here the expression, “Well the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree you know….”
This expression connects a students behaviour to their parents. The bias this creates can harm a students chance to be successful. In the future, it will be easier and easier to predict a student’s future outcome not only based on behaviour of their parents, but also through comprehensive data collection. It is certainly possible that the data collected for a grade four student will be predictive of their personal success in the world. The consequences of this will be that large swathes of the population may find themselves left behind while schools focus on drafting students that are destined to succeed. Successful students will help a school build a reputation for their programme. By curating enrollment, a private school’s brand will become synonymous with success. The end result is a society of haves and have nots whose destiny is predetermined. While this happens today, the collection of data will intensify the effect.
The second issue will be the value of an individual’s information to groups that provide insurance. Health data, behaviour data, and personality data will allow insurance companies to avoid “liability” of “high risk individuals”. This may lower overall rates for the average person, but it will force the weakest even further off the path to success. At what point does the value of big data and our desire to see the strong to survive override human empathy and care for those who are weaker? How will this impact us as a society?
The most revealing thing about my post here is how much time I’m spending living inside a bubble of math chat. As both a teacher of summer school math and a tutor of math online the number of texts that I’m sending related to math topics has increased dramatically over the past six weeks. This seems to have had a huge impact on my preemptive text choices. This mirrors my inability to sleep well at night because I lay awake thinking about how to make grade 11 math more understandable for students. AI Has captured the moment in my life that doesn’t happen very often. This is the first time I’ve ever taught summer school and so for me this is an anomaly but obviously one that the texting gods recognize. While I fear less the AI bots that challenge elections and change the way society thinks, my concerns were raised mainly by the social AI robot that was used to fill the gap when family were not able to take care of those in need. With Covid on right now this hit home and I do see a place for it however I also see a very dark spiral that could lead to humans Disconnecting from family because of other commitments and the fact that a social robot can fill the roll played by family interaction. I have no fear that bots will play a role in the end of the world. what I fear most is not being recognized or heard when I become the one who needs to be taken care of.
I feel like this exercise exposed a rather unflattering personality trait in me. I get frustrated easily. I am not one to suffer fools and so I will admit that during the assignment process, my fist pounding on the table was starting to make the family stare and ask questions.
If there is a special room reserved for the “no it alls”, the security line budders and and drivers that don’t signal, I imagine that this is the form they will have to fill in to get into the “Bad Place”. I got started on this assignment later in the week with many other projects going on in my life and gave up on Thursday evening in frustration at the “almost done” page.
On Friday night, I returned like an addict to try again and again to solve the many GUI challenges and finally made it to the end. My frustrations didn’t end there. I struggled to get outlook to open for about 5 minutes,
and my attempts to upload an image from my phone to this laptop were stymied at every turn. Eventually, everything worked out and I recall myself thinking that I should be using this type of experience as a way to model the type of behaviour I expect from my grade five students. arghghhhh!
The weeks module has been an eye-opener in many respects based on Tristan Harris’ video that reminds us that our media is watching what we watch and picking the path we take whether we like it or not. Having lived through the 2016 American election and the latest Senate hearings with MArk Zuckerberg trying deftly to avoid painting himself into a corner, I am not ignorant to the planning that goes on behind the scenes of the social media world. What scares me most is the lack of human intervention. When an algorithm is the conductor of the train, who will stop us from going off the rails?
I have left poor Carlton Banks on his side because that is the way life is in the real world and I am okay with it. 🙂
Palladio is a data analysis tool that leaves me wanting more information. Although it has the ability to group students by matching song choice, it does not attempt to make a judgment call on why a student chose the songs they chose. By grouping us in the groups I see, Palladio is obviously a number cruncher of sorts. This ability to produce connections based on raw data numbers helps us to eliminate the people who we had song choices that did not match up with our own and to focus on those that are most connected. To know WHY a student chose the songs they chose is not possible based on the data; however, we have a treasure trove of information in our WEEK 8 assignment to guide us. In order to find real connections, I took a look at my group. Next, I looked at a few specific song choices where I matched up with the masses. I also looked at three songs that I picked that were very sparsely chosen. Finally, I picked one student who seemed to make the fewest matches to my song choices.
Part 1 – People who matched up with my choices the most.
Group 1 – Kevin, Ryan and Rania
The graphic above is a Palladio visualization of group I was placed in along with Kevin and Rania. While we shared a set of 3 songs in common out of our 10-song choice, we also had 2 to 3 songs that none of us shared with the other. This led me to question the grouping system used by Palladio. I was unable to decipher whether Rania and Kevin were fans of Bach based on the results. The fact that Kevin and I shared 6 of our ten songs was amazing from a probability standpoint, however, when I saw that we were about the same age and both white and male, I began to see connections. Having both avoided Johnny B Goode seemed like it was against the odds in some ways, but my choices wee curated based on the events of the week as much as my love for old time rock and roll.
Looking at the remaining groups I got a picture of what was popular and what was not. The Blue denotes popular piecesthe read is a map of the curators. The Lime green were songs that appeared very few times.in the groups analyzed.
The big winners in the musical lottery were Jaat Kahan Ho, Morning Star/Devil Bird, and Beethoven’s 5th. Of the three pieces I had only ever heard of Beethoven 5th. After listening to the other two pieces, I knew they had to be apart of my collection. While I was not able to tease out why these three were so popular, I know that they all took us under their spell. There is little connection between the three pieces beyond being great examples of their craft.
What made me go back and study the Palladio visualization even more was the songs that I chose that did not find a connection in the minds of my classmates. These songs were Bach’s Fugue in C minor played by Glenn Gould, Bach’s Gavotte Rondeaux and the Blind Willie Johnson song “”Dark was the Night”. The Bach pieces were probably true outliers with all the classical competition from Beethoven and Mozart in the list.
The one that surprised me the most was the Blind Willie Johnson song. We had just come through a painful week of recognition that our societies basic systems were flawed. People were protesting the fact that an individual’s safety was not only not guaranteed in the hands of the people that have pledged to serve and protect. In fact, it was worse than we had thought based on the number of cases of injustice that had come to light. This song echoed the plight of a man whose position in society should have been secure, yet he died a pauper in the burned-out hull of a house that he should have called home. Life is not fair, but we are now more aware than ever that the scales are tipped in favour of one group over another, and this played a part in my decision to choose this song. I gave the aboriginal songs from the Navajo and the Australian outback a second look after discovering they had not made my top 8. Both songs were chosen on merit, but the fact that we were reflecting on race during this time, gave me pause.
The Palladio visualization for the people least connected to me was my favourite part of the night. I have a love of choirs and a distaste for panpipes, so Kelvin and I did not see eye to eye on our choices. Kelvin mentions that he began his selection by focusing on instrumental pieces and then looking for a diverse selection that showcased world music. He also mentions growing up with the radio playing music in his house a lot. Piano lessons and CBC were a main stay for me and as a choir boy, I started my selection by picking choirs. This may partially explain our differences. While Palladio does not tell us why, it does lead us on a path that we may not have been able to find on our own. With a mere two overlapping songs though, I think this represents a near statistical impossibility, and we might benefit from buying a lottery ticket each this week.
While our musical taste may differ, it is unclear whether that is a conclusion we can reach based solely on the factors involved when choosing a set of songs. We all came at the problem with our own set of preferences, but there was no clear rubric that outlined how to choose the songs and this leaves so much up to fate that it would be silly to try and reach real conclusions strictly based on the results of the Palladio visualization. The true nature of our decisions lies deep within us, like an iceberg that may appear as one thing on the surface of the ocean but be something wholly different when viewed from below. I think the cables that stretch across the ocean floors might see the iceberg from a different perspective.
Hammel, N., & Yurshansky, L. [Nat and Friends]. (2016, December 16). A Journey To The Bottom Of The Internet . Retrieved from https://youtu.be/
This was a great idea. I love the fact that I will get to visualize the results in a way that doesn’t mean clicking onto so many sites. The analytics course is my last one and I am signed up for it in the fall. The evolution of my list was an interesting process. I started out with pieces like Chuck Berry and Mozart’s because I knew them well and thought they would naturally make it on my list. After spending some time listening to the selections and spending Canada Day fighting with family over what “had” to make it on my list, I was left with 10 songs that sent chills down my spine and opened my mind to a more diverse world of music. 11 songs was my magic number so I feel obliged to mention the Bulgarian song “Izlel je Delyo Haydutin” as the bridesmaid.
The list is strictly a measure of how the music made me feel. Having played piano and song in choirs, these songs connected with me far more than those that didn’t include voice. With out further ado and in no particular order:
Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F. First Movement – Bach has always held a special place n my heart. The children’s CD “When Bach Comes to Call”, references the Golden Record on Explorer’s mission.
Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C, No.1. Glenn Gould, piano. – Bach as above, and of course Glenn Gould’s version is special for Canadians.
Bach, “Gavotte en rondeaux” from the Partita No. 3 in E major for Violin
Navajo Indians, Night Chant, recorded by Willard Rhodes. – This was the one that skimmed into the group like a person catching a subway train as the doors close. I didn’t realize how infecting the chant would become over time.
Melancholy Blues,” performed by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven Louis Armstrong plays a free and easy style that makes your sadness feel shared. This song speaks volumes about the movement that has gripped the planet as we begin to realize how certain segments of the population have not had a voice. While this voice has always been heard the sound is different in this day and age.
Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement – This song raises music to a level of communication that may speak more about our world than any written work. The ups and downs. The crescendos. I hear debate, war, stormy weather, and love.
“Dark Was the Night,” written and performed by Blind Willie Johnson
I hear pure meloncholy in this piece. It’s the taste of sadness we all know but never want to talk about.
India, raga, “Jaat Kahan Ho,” sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar
My daughter’s recent trip to Rajisthan has got me interested in the music of this wonderful part of India.
Georgian S.S.R., chorus, “Tchakrulo,” collected by Radio Moscow.
As a young student, I was a choir boy and my daughter also followed in my footsteps. I am always amazed by the powerful strength found in a group of voices. It feels like they are all allowing each other to sing more powerfully because of the srength in numbers. We all struggle when singing solo. It’s the power of the group that makes us feel able to let it rip.
Australia, Aborigine songs, “Morning Star” and “Devil Bird,”
I hear a didgeridoo and I have to stop and bounce around like a teenager again. This song went on to expand into other sounds and chanting voices that left a rhythmic mark on my soul.
The New London Group’s influence on how we approach the teaching of literacy, stems from a desire to be more inclusive. As society becomes more culturally and linguistically diverse, how we reach the goal of educating everyone has to mirror the shift towards a multimodal world we live in. To that effect, this tasks goal is to take a visual and text-based task and approach it from a different semiotic mode. Sound is the medium and my goal is to showcase its role as part of a suite of technological tools that transformhow we teach literacy in order to benefit our global audience.
Multiliteracies is the name given to the New London Group’s approach to literacy pedagogy. The “multi” is both a reference to the changes from one medium to many, (text to audio in this case), as well as the recognition that the audience is made up of multiple groups. All these groups deserve the right to benefit from a learning experience that lowers the barriers to success that exist in our present approach.
The main audio is an oral explanation of the bags contents but listen for other clues too. Listen for sounds that play a part in identifying the objects being spoken about. If you are listening closely you should be able to name Zambia’s major river.
It also sounds like I am recording this in a cave. Not quite sure why, but that is strictly beginner Garageband skills.
My back up plan for the audio file is a link to my google drive in case the WordPress audio block is not working.
Email and texting seem to be the origin of the emoji. Email and texting represent an evolution of the face-to-face conversation that has allowed us to engage in this type of communication asynchronously. The struggle is that writing often does not allow us to pass on simple non-verbal cues. Non-verbal elements such as facial expressions and gestures play a huge part in creating a sense of connection between two people and this has lately been adopted by writers on a more broad scale. Kress believes that ” writing is giving way, is being displaced by image in many instances of communication,” and that this is not entirely a bad thing. While this assignment does not prove his thesis, it does allow us to take a personal ste towards understanding the social effects of this shift from written text to image based communication.
When we take emojis away, and provide readers with a simple text, it is harder for a reader to understand or connect with an author’s message on an emotional level. To be sure, ideas can be conveyed by text, but if a writer tries to build a relationship that allows the communication between two people to flourish, it must involve an emotional connection. Emojis are just the right amount of commitment to allow a writer to make better connections with their readers. By utilizing a basic set of symbols that have become stand-ins for non-verbal elements, basic emotions can be communicated on the written page through emojis. We also need to consider the gap between what emojis are capable of communicating and real emotions. True emotional connection does not get passed along in a simple emoji. If we compare a lifelong friendship to a person you serve dinner to in a restaurant, emojis are just enough emotional connection to increase your tip, but the level of commitment is still far less than real friendship.
The movie I chose has a plot that emojis can not quite connect to, but the over use of heart emojis should allow the “viewer” to know that love plays a part in the plot.
Did you rely more on syllables, words, ideas or a combination of all of them?
I think ideas were the most important element however, I did try my best to recreate the names of the characters using emojis. My attempts to make syllable word puzzles by adding emojis and subtracting parts of them was really tough.
The one attempt I can tell you about without breaking my vow of silence on name of the film is the last line……did you get it?
Dolphin – doll = FIN (ie The End)
lol
My search for a doll took up much more time than I suppose I should have allocated towards this less than “doll-like” emoji.
Did you start with the title? Why? Why not?
I did start with the title. This allowed me to find ways to create parts of words from emojis as opposed to allowing them to fulfill their destiny as emotional connectors.
Did you choose the work based on how easy would it be to visualize?
Definitely not. If I wanted easy I would have done Star Wars…..This movie will be a very tough one for anyone over 35.
The break-up of any relationship is a process of realization that two people are not meant to be with one another.
In this Twine story, one person is breaking up with the other so the realization is not shared. Even the way we see a text begins to make us question what the reality of the situation actually is. Each pathway that makes up the story includes an image of a text. Each time, the words are given a different meaning by changing how they appear:
“Hey are you okay?
“I’m Fine…”
The words “I’m Fine” are written with three dots after the word fine. This shows a lack of finality.
In another version they are all CAPS.
In a third version, they are appended by a cute emoji that makes us all look at the words “I’m fine” and say “Oh good, you really are fine.”
While texting may seem to have dealt a blow to the overall concrete value you can place in a word or phrase because of how fast language evolves, it should not be viewed as a catastrophe for written language. Each phrase we type can be examined for innuendo, sarcasm or genuine truth. What this week’s reading made clear, was that what one person writes today may have a different meaning in the future. Helen Saltzman and her guest on the New Allusionist, Episode 102 made this very clear.
Here is what the web of links looks like. I look at it and all I can think about is the airline maps in the free magazine they have on board every flight. Chicago must be that square right in the middle with all the flights heading into O’Hare.
Right click the image and hit “Open Image” to take a closer look. Left click to go to the story.
I tend to; be a hand-writer because of my job as a grade school teacher, however, this is changing by the year and with distance learning going on, I find myself writing less and less without the aid of a word processor.
I teach poetry for a three-week session each year, so I know the basics. This allows me to feel a certain level of confidence in the product, while others may feel a little less self-assured when it comes to handing over creative pieces like this. I did write notes in Word to start the process, but three or four sheets were wasted in the creation of this hand-written poem.
I think the fact that I had to restart was less to do with the content and more to do with squeezing in the text for a line in the space provided by an 8.5 x11 sheet of blank paper. I restarted three or four times because the word “motion “ at the end of the first line, kept getting jammed up or curled around or under. I think if I had had a problem later in the process I would not have restarted. “collective stupidity” did not fit , but it definitely didn’t force me to start again at that point. Too much was invested by then. This happens whenever I need to do a voice over for a slideshow. If I make a mistake and haven’t invested minutes into a recording, I’ll begin again. If the dog starts slurping water out of his bowl and a doorbell rings when I am two or three minutes into recording I will gladly leave it be. LI figure it is ike little margin notes of the digital age. I can only imagine what it must have felt like as a young monk starting out on your transcribing career and finding a mistake on the last line of a full page of handwritten text.
The biggest challenge I see with hand written work is the ability to share your work easily. Although as I say this, I am realizing that I did share a photo of my poem on Instagram by taking a picture of it, so that argument is moot for the those of us living in this day and age. The consistency and professionalism of words processed digitally can’t be overlooked, but I still think that handwriting will always have a personalized feel that you can not get from the typed word. Emotions are stronger in handwriting. I connect and offer up more energy when I read a handwritten note, because its very presence in this day and age is an anomaly.The fact that a person has taken the time to record something that is meaningful and therefore worth the time and effort to hand write says something. ALL CAPS may convey emotion, but it does not have as big an impact as a handwritten note. I also prefer hand writing, but I understand it is slowly fading away like the elevator operator and the stick shift. Just because things disappear, doesn’t mean they are not valuable.
On a side note, the title is written with a set of potato stamps. I like arts and crafts, but I love poetry even more. My word had only one letter that is not perfectly symmetrical so that was a time saver. I only had to redo the “L”
Don’t tell anyone, but I hid little x’s all around the unfinished basement with the extra paint I had.
This is the raw text from the “voice to text” experiment we undertook this week. It is a tale of a boy named Jeremy.
This is the story I’m going to tell you about how our Frisbee team got its actual name our Frisbee team the ultimate Frisbee team I played with for many years is called to Hans Jeremy and it all goes back to a time about 40 years ago on December 24 we were all at our own houses eating turkey and stuffing and drinking lots of cans of Ginger ale and then over indulging in all kinds of other things like treats and snacks and candy you name it on December 24 it was a ritual in our neighborhood to all head out at midnight to go to the midnight mass and one of our friends in particular Jeremy would always get there about 45 minutes early because his parents wanted to be in the front row so anyways Jeremy was upfront and we were all in the back room anyways Jeremy looked a little bit worse for wear and we could tell that he had really overindulged he kept turning to his father and asking him if you could leave and go to the washroom and I think his dad was saying no because they’re in the front row and it was just too much of a bother well as the
church filled out more and got warmer Jeremy just got greener and greener and it was about five minutes until the priest is about to head down the aisle when Jeremy finally started to lose it and this is the point where the name of our frisbee team comes from so Jeremy put one hand up to his mouth and he said dad I can’t make it and dad said OK if you go and Jeremy started to move his way out of the aisle just as the priest was heading down from the back of the church and he got to the aisle he looked at his dad and he said I can’t make it and dad looked at him and he saidHis dad said to Hans Jeremy to Hans and it was at that point the Jeremy reached out with a secondhand but it was just too late his second hand formed more of a launching pad and a block for what was to come out and it was the Technicolour a yard of the century for all to see at midnight mass and that’s how we got our name for our Frisbee team or Frisbee team name is to Hans Jeremy Endu has Jeremy’s been around for about 20 years we have T-shirts we have one championship to our name in the great social thing that we are playing after 12 years but mostly we have a lot of fun because that’s what frisbee is really all about frisbees about having fun and hanging out being social I’ve carried on the tradition at my school and I do tell the I do tell the story just before we head into the finals of our championship games for the grade 78 ultimate frisbee team it’s always that last minute sort of hurrah that gets my students laughing and feeling confident and going into the game with a smile on their face and really spirit is a big part of ultimate frisbee all right that’s the story I wanted to tell just wanted to make sure that the name to Hans Jeremy lives on in infamy because it definitely deserves it thanks a lot
Here is a link to me telling the tale and watching it stream onto my screen.
How does the text deviate from conventions of written English?
My text ended up being one long run on sentence. The only punctuation was capitalization of a few proper nouns. The lack of punctuation changed the meaning of the text drastically at times. This led to subject confusion and to places where the software made adjustments that it felt made sense when in fact it did not. The toughest parts to understand were the dialogue or spoken parts that should have included quotations and other writing conventions to allow the reader to recreate the sound of what was said. Without these conventions of dialogue, even I started to get confused. The most amazing part for me was the late changes that occurred 30 seconds after the “voice-to text” had written a word. I watched back the video tape of the process and the word “gonna” and “God” were deviations that disappeared well after they were typed on the screen (check the changes at 1:05 on the video). While the computer was compiling my voice, it was also referring back and making changes based on what was written later.
What is “wrong” in the text? What is “right”?
I think the most amazing part of this experience was related to what the “Voice-to-text tool” got correct. When it comes to recognizing and then spelling words correctly, this system was near infallible. The text had no real spelling errors at all. I noticed it recreating words based on the context even after it had written a word and that amazed me. This type of self correction is new to me. The only errors were based on moments when the software misheard or more likely, I mispronounced a word. For example, the very first correction was the name of our Ultimate Frisbee Team, “Two Hands Jeremy” . The computer heard “to Hans Jeremy”. I said “Hands” over and over again and realized that I do not pronounce the d in “Hands” at all. I also have a friend named Hans, and I wonder if the software takes into account the fact that this is a name found in the texting and messaging I do on this tablet device. While it seemed unlikely at first, what confirmed this for me was when the phrase “….or Frisbee team name is to Hans Jeremy Endu has Jeremy’s been around for about 20 years …” appeared. This should have read, “Our Frisbee team name is Two Hands Jeremy and Two hands Jeremy has been around for about 20 years…” There is little chance that Endu, a fellow teacher at my school would end up in “voice-to-text” for someone who did not have an Endu in their contacts.
What are the most common “mistakes” in the text, and why do you consider them “mistakes”?
The most common error for me was the computer outputting names for words I did not pronounce well. As mentioned earlier, Hans and Endu are both names in my contacts that appeared in the text without having played any part in the story at all. I also had the following phrase pop up: “drinking lots of cans of Ginger ale.” I can’t figure out whether the software wanted to write Ginger Ale and just forgot to capitalize the second word, or more likely, it was counting on Ginger being a name by itself. The one name that does appear in the story was Jeremy and it was spelled and capitalized impeccably every time.
What if you had “scripted” the story? What difference might that have made?
If I had tried to read the story aloud from a script it would have lost a sense of naturalness that comes from oral unscripted storytelling. Scripts are rehearsed and this precision can leave both the presenter and the audience disconnected at times. It is possible to watch a well rehearsed narrative and enjoy it, but the ability to read an audience and sense when a certain aspect of the performance has connected with them is the strength of the oral performance. If a man conducting an orchestra stands still in front of his team and barely moves his baton, he appears to be following a script and both the audience and the orchestra can be left underwhelmed. On the other hand, when the conductor is flailing around the stage and her baton is jabbing and stabbing the air as she hops madly about, anything seems possible. Will she throw her baton? Will she fall off the stage? Live unscripted performance is like real life. There are no good guys and bad guys just moments when we have no idea what is coming next and that, in itself, is a thrill that only comes from live unscripted performance. It is what makes watching last year’s basketball playoffs unfulfilling. Without an audience, my own oral retelling of the story of Jeremy lacked energy. There was no need for hand gestures and bulging eyes and this changed the overall presentation for the worse, in my opinion.
In what ways does oral storytelling differ from written storytelling?
I love telling this story aloud as I alluded to in the “voice-to-text” narrative. This allowed me to speak naturally adding inflection and emphasis where it was needed to increase suspense as the gurgling tummy started to rumble and boil. The written text does not do this story justice. Not only is my typical teenage audience missing, the ability to create suspense about an impending explosion is downright difficult with out the hand gestures and bulging eyes. This story deserves to be told visually. There are ways to present a picture with the written word, but the words needed to do this can never match the physical presence of a storyteller or actors. Great writers can attain this lofty goal, but it is a gift we don’t all share. Our modern day comedians are the best example of oral storytellers that I can come up with who can use an assortment of tools they pull out in order to capture a mood with a turn of the head and raised eyebrow. While the written story is polished and filled with imagery, it pales in comparison to the raw energy of oral story telling.
Ed Note:
Gnanadeskin’s application of the broken telephone to oral tradition is always a hard one for me to swallow. I think that the changes made in the oral tradition have less to do with how we hear and much more to do with how we inspire. It is one thing to say a word wrong because you don’t hear it correctly, but the real changes often involve the desire to build up a story to make someone look better. For example “that fish I caught last summer was 12….no 16 inches long…..no 20 inches and it had giant teeth!” These aren’t the type of errors you make because you genuinely forgot the truth. I know Jeremy threw up a little but the technicolour yawn is a very large overstatement that only gets more embellished as the years pass.
were all at our own houses eating turkey and stuffing and drinking lots of cans of Ginger ale and then over indulging in all kinds of other things like treats and snacks and candy you name it on December 24 it was a ritual in our neighborhood to all head out at midnight to go to the midnight mass and one of our friends in particular Jeremy would always get there about 45 minutes early because his parents wanted to be in the front row so anyways Jeremy was upfront and we were all in the back room anyways Jeremy looked a little bit worse for wear and we could tell that he had really overindulged he kept turning to his father and asking him if you could leave and go to the washroom and I think his dad was saying no because they’re in the front row and it was just too much of a bother well as the