I had a plan for Josh to continue where we left off in his grammar lessons (a few weeks ago we discussed complete vs. incomplete sentences). After working a little on independent vs. dependent clauses, it was clear that Josh was in a very discouraged mood. To help, I asked him what was wrong. Immediately, he began to express his indignation with the public school system as it concerns special education, college, and dual enrollment. He said that some of his teachers had indicated that he was not smart enough to enter into what Josh considered a "real" university, saying that PBSC was the best place for ESE students like Josh. I told Josh that he was definitely smart enough for college, and that I am in fact a PBSC graduate, so he shouldn't take going there as an insult. Josh was clearly in need of an outlet for his angst, so I told him to write a 5 paragraph essay about what's wrong with the school system. As he was writing, Josh did a good job of expressing the wrongs of the public Florida school system, and by the end of his introduction, he said: "I think I've cooled down now." Nevertheless, I had Josh finish the exercise.

To reinforce Josh's grammar consciousness, I went over the difference between complete sentences and sentence fragments with him in this lesson. After providing an overview of both, I had Josh define the terms for himself and give me an example of each. Josh clearly understood the difference between sentences and fragments, so we moved on to Exercise A in our grammar text. Josh and I worked together to find the sentence fragments, but on this first set, Josh had some difficulty, especially with fragments that had a subject and a verb, but were missing information to make them complete sentences. To help, I told Josh that if he can "fill in the blanks," then the sentence was not complete. This seemed to aid him a lot, and he excelled in the next two exercises. Josh is such a hard worker!

Today, I had Josh read and answer several FCAT based questions and passages. The first passage was "Night" from Elie Wiesel, and Josh had to infer from the passage the setting, time period, and characters. This he did with little trouble, but he needed a bit of help to stay focused. Once redirected, however, Josh was able to catch himself getting off track, and we struck a deal that he could express any extra thoughts at the end of the discussion. The next passage was "Hercules," and Josh seemed to enjoy its content thoroughly. Josh did very well on both passages, answering 4/5 questions correctly on each passage. We need to work on Josh mixing-up some of the details from the passage, but I was very pleased with how he performed on this exercise.

Josh continued working on the next phase of his narrative essay, outlining the "hardest" part of working for Sega. Josh had some really creative ideas to contribute, and was able to fully verbalize the ideas that he wanted to communicate ("the lack of calculators made it really difficult to do long division problems"), but he had some trouble tracking how/when to place these ideas in his narrative chronology. Josh will say exactly what he means, but in writing will start in the middle of his thoughts rather than the beginning of the next sentence: instead of writing, "we went to the movies," Josh will say, "to the movies." This skipping over information usually happens when Josh uses articles and prepositions. To help, I had Josh stop after writing and re-read his typing. Once prompted, Josh was able to identify mistakes and go back and provide any missing information. The end product was really fantastic, and I think that Josh is very proud of how the essay is progressing.

Josh continued writing his Narrative Essay about his first job as a response to our reading "Climbing the Golden Arches." I asked Josh to exercise his description ability by having him add adjectives to his writing. Josh was able to come up with some really great verbs and adjectives, calling the task "challenging," and describing the coffee as "scalding." Josh is getting better at keeping track of his thought-process as he writes, connecting new ideas to ideas that he has already written. Before, there was a disconnect, but now Josh seems more aware of how to keep things consistent in writing in space and in time.

After reading our outline an introduction, Josh and I spent some time planning for the Phase One section of his "My First Job" paper. Earlier, Josh decided that the moral of his narrative would be: "If you work hard you can accomplish any task." With this in mind, we tracked the necessary steps or phases that Josh had to outline to reach this conclusion. At first, Josh wanted to say that there was nothing hard about the job, but I reminded him that this conflicted with the moral of the narrative. Afterwards, he decided that Phase One should outline the nature of the work environment, how he felt and what was required of him, and that Phase Two would be where he describes how work was hard, but that with diligent effort, he was able to complete the task with great success. While writing, I had to remind Josh about punctuation like commas, periods, quotations, etc. On the whole, Josh's paper is moving along smoothly.

Josh and I completed our reading assignment "Climbing the Golden Arches." Afterwards, I had Josh recount (while citing evidence) some of the key transitional points in the narrative: "Where does the story transition from different phases of the narrator's work experience to the next?" "Who is the narrator by the end of the story?" "If the narrator did not explain that she was learning and maturing along the way, how would this affect the narrative?". Josh did an excellent job of answering these questions, although he needed to be refocused from "Family Guy" references during our discussions. After discussing the story at length, we moved on to writing, and I asked Josh to write a story about a work experience that he had, organizing his experience into different "phases" much like the narrator from "Climbing the Golden Arches."

Josh and I read "Climbing the Golden Arches," in the Norton Sampler. Afterwards, I worked with Josh on essay organization, reminding him of how essays have an introduction, thesis statement, body and conclusion. Once we established these elements, I gave Josh the prompt: "Write a letter of application to your ideal job. Explain your qualifications, your career goals, and how you expect to achieve them.

Going along with our theme of satire and parody, Josh and I read the funny article "No Wonder They Call me a Bi***h," which was about how a food critic decided to apply her knowledge to dog food; hence the title. Josh seemed to really enjoy the work, commenting on the descriptive nature of the author's experience in writing and how he "would never have done that!" At the end, I had Josh consider the "bigger message" that this satire was communicating. At first, Josh seemed to think only superficially about the issue "The author doesn't really like dog food," but with some consideration he was able to generalize the issue: "the dog food industry doesn't really care about what it feeds pets." This was a huge step for Josh, and I am excited to see his critical thinking skills grow from this experience.

I introduced the topic of critical thinking to Josh this evening, defining inductive and deductive reasoning for him. While Josh had some trouble with this at first, I gave him the example of juxtaposing Dr. Seuss and Shakespeare to demonstrate how, based on inductive reasoning, we can use certain instances to draw specific conclusions. Here, the conclusion that Josh came to was that by comparing Dr. Seuss and Shakespeare, Epic Rap Battles pointed to a skewed paradigm in our society where Dr. Seuss can be just as valued as Shakespeare in literature.