Bob
SoWal Insider
No Choice About the Terminology - Happy Days Blog - NYTimes.com July 28, 2009, 9:30 pm
No Choice About the Terminology
By Mark Dow
Amy and I stood at the Xerox machine watching each other pay attention to our own palates and tongues. We kept the chocolate-covered caramel-topped cookie pieces in our mouths as long as we could without swallowing, and I hit the reduction-enlargement button over and over again. We started nodding and laughing. We were pretty sure we could taste what our student heard, or see what he meant.
Amy was an art teacher and a therapist, and I was an untrained classroom teacher at the so-called special school in Massachusetts, where our student ?Steve? liked to play with the Xerox machine in the teacher?s library as a reward on days he?d behaved. He liked to press the reduction-enlargement button and listen to the sound of the lens aperture closing and opening. He would do this over and over again. It was 1988 or so; the mechanism was easily audible. When I asked him what he liked about the Xerox sound, he said, I guess it?s a kind of a creamy, crunchy sound, like the inside of a Twix Bar.
He said this with deliberation because he wanted to get it right, but without self-consciousness about the words he was using. He was just answering another question from the adults.
First thing in the morning, Steve would usually say something like: ?Last night I had cheese ravioli with marinara sauce plus a Pepsi. You do know that I really do love cheese ravioli and Pepsi, right??
No Choice About the Terminology
By Mark Dow
Amy and I stood at the Xerox machine watching each other pay attention to our own palates and tongues. We kept the chocolate-covered caramel-topped cookie pieces in our mouths as long as we could without swallowing, and I hit the reduction-enlargement button over and over again. We started nodding and laughing. We were pretty sure we could taste what our student heard, or see what he meant.
Amy was an art teacher and a therapist, and I was an untrained classroom teacher at the so-called special school in Massachusetts, where our student ?Steve? liked to play with the Xerox machine in the teacher?s library as a reward on days he?d behaved. He liked to press the reduction-enlargement button and listen to the sound of the lens aperture closing and opening. He would do this over and over again. It was 1988 or so; the mechanism was easily audible. When I asked him what he liked about the Xerox sound, he said, I guess it?s a kind of a creamy, crunchy sound, like the inside of a Twix Bar.
He said this with deliberation because he wanted to get it right, but without self-consciousness about the words he was using. He was just answering another question from the adults.
First thing in the morning, Steve would usually say something like: ?Last night I had cheese ravioli with marinara sauce plus a Pepsi. You do know that I really do love cheese ravioli and Pepsi, right??
yep, that's what i have,....a piece of mind. 
...finally, soemone who types worse than I do!