Monday blahs and a blind man

Interesting week, this was. 

• It started off nice with a good time with the PEOs, wrapping up another year. 

• On Wednesday, Party Girl called me at home to vent about some testing center drama. 

I agree with her rantings, but I've somewhat distanced myself from it. I removed myself to only working a couple of shifts per week, and now Party Girl has done that too. 

When she called, it sounded to me like she'd been drinking, which is likely true. I think she drinks daily after work, stepping it up on the weekends. It's not somethig she hides. She'd also told me that she thinks alcohol makes her "feisty". She was dealing with a lawsuit for much of last year, so she quit the sauce to be clear headed for the proceedings. A bit to her surprise, she found she didn't care about the outcome of the lawsuit after stopping the booze. Ha!

Bottom line, she and I used to work Mondays together. After I removed myself from the Monday schedule in order to do more tutoring, she was left with our newest staffer. Let's call him Buzz. Buzz is an okay guy, but... uhm... incompetent. Basically, he doesn't do much of anything.

So she ranted to Boss and Grandboss, got nowhere, then decided to take the cut in pay and also remove herself from Mondays. It was worth it for her mental health, she says. 

This coming Monday should be interesting.

• On Thursday, I was tasked with reading and scribing a math test for a student who is totally blind. That was a learn-as-we-go experience if there ever was one. It was slow and stumbly, much repeating required. He eventually got through the test, going way over the time he was alotted. Normally, we would've stopped when time was up, but we figured we'd just see how this first one goes. It was a physically draining experience.

He and I had never met before, and he was nervous with general test anxiety at first, and he also has some learning delays. After a bit (and some mystery pill that he popped), he calmed down, and we developed a good rapport. 

He'd told me he's interested in "computers and music" and I googled his name afterward to see if he had any online presence. The only thing I found was a news story from about 24 years ago when he was an infant. 

The news story was about a child care worker, sentenced for 16 years in prison and ordered to pay $500,000, for violently shaking a baby in her care.

"When [student] was shaken, he suffered brain damage, a detached retina in his left eye and bleeding in both eyes..."

 Yup. The baby grew up to be my blind tester. He was a healthy, sighted 4-month old when it happened. 

Talk about draining. 

Well, shoot, I don't want to leave this post on such a sad note! I will say that the student seems  be dealing with those lemons well enough. I'll probably be his designated reader/scriber for the semester, and I know he has a lot of other support in his "network".