Miss Cindy, the reading instructor

I work with a woman, let's call her Cindy. She is a teacher's aide. She usually helps the students with reading in Mrs. Pinkman's classroom. She is a native of Idaho, born and raised in St. Anthony. She's told me on numerous occasions that she's never been out of Idaho. She is thirty-three years old. She loves to talk non-stop. In fact, if you let her she will talk for hours on end, even if she receives no responses or confirmations from the people around her. Mostly she tells disjointed personal anecdotes that have no context whatsoever. She will flow in and out of old stories, personal opinions on everything from politics to cake, and stream-of-consciousness rambling. Listening to her speak is kind of like a sublime free-form jazz, except if jazz were twice as annoying and fifty times more repetitive.

The amazing thing is how she can keep going with so little input from me or the other teacher in the room. I usually never speak a word to her, concentrating on cutting shapes out of construction paper or whatever task is at hand. The other teacher, Mrs. Pinkman, will either completely ignore her or start talking over her, sharing her own endless personal "anecdotes" until there are times when they are overlapping! They just talk over one another! I know this sounds crazy, but they do! Neither will stop, and once they start they can go on for five minutes or so of just overlap talking!

So both of these women are insane. But for my money, I'd rather have Cindy's ramblings because they're a little more baffling.

I had the excruciating experience of listening to Cindy read to the children from various books. Every morning when the children arrive, before the individual mentoring Mrs. Pinkman asks Cindy to read to the kids. It's a cruel thing to do, like making a mortally wounded box turtle participate in a biathlon. By Cindy's own admission, she's "not much of a reader." In fact, she tells me that she "hates books and reading." That is, except for Fablehaven, which is a book her eight year old son picked up. She said that she read his copy of Fablehaven and it was "the best book I've ever read in my life." Keep in mind that this book is aimed towards an eight to ten-year-old audience. Of course there's nothing wrong with an adult enjoying a children's book. Good for her. But it's kind of sad that she works as a reading tutor when she, of her own admission, hates reading.

The reason why I said listening to her read was excruciating is because her reading ability is about on the same level as the first-graders we're trying to help. She read a tiny book written at a third or fourth grade level and couldn't pronounce many of the words. For example:

Hovel. "The family lived in a small, dirty hovel. It was a cramped hovel, full of children and pets."
Now from the context clues alone, even if you didn't know this word I'd hope you could guess a hovel was some sort of dwelling place or home. One of the kids asked her, "Miss Cindy, what's a hoe-vul?" (Because she kept pronouncing the word "hoe-vul.") Miss Cindy's response: "I don't know."

Minstrel. "A minstrel came to the town, playing his music and singing songs." Okay, again. Maybe she's never heard of a minstrel, but doesn't the context give a clue here? Plus, she kept pronouncing the word "minis-terel."

Lute. "The minstrel played his lute for the crowd. He plucked its strings and sang..." When the children asked what a lute was, Cindy answered, "A loot is kind of like his treasure. It's like when you loot something, you take all the treasure in a backpack. That's his loot." What that says to me, then, is that Cindy has never seen the word "loot" in print. Because wouldn't she realize this type of "lute" was spelled differently from "loot?" Also, does her definition make a shred of sense in the context of the sentence she read?

Bathe and bathing. "The children of the home hated to bathe. When it came time for bathing, they all ran away." Every time the word "bathe" or "bathing" came up in the story, she pronounced it "bath." So the word "bathe" should sound like "bay-the" but she would pronounce it "bath," like "bath tub." "Bathing" should be pronounced "bay-thing," but she pronounced it "bath-thing." Oh, how I wish I were making this up.

I stopped recording her mispronounced words after she finished about two or three pages. It hurt me too much. Instead, I decided to keep a small record of her ramblings after all the kids had left the room. Here is what I collected in the course of about an hour. Enjoy!

"I looooooove to go hucklebeerryin'. I could spend all day huckleberryin'. My aunt used to take us huckleberryin' for huckleberries down by [some place]. My kids all love huckleberryin' too. My first date with my hubby was when we went huckleberryin' -huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'-huckleberryin'- etc."

"Well I don't get gay people at all, because you know what? It's supposed to be Adam and Eve, not Adam and STEVE! Get it?? It's Adam and Eve, like from the Bible, not Adam and Steve! It's not Adam and Steve, is it? No. It's Adam and EVE. Adam and EVE in the Garden of Eden, it's not Adam and Steve!"

"I love the smell of rubber cement. I used to smell this all the time when I was a kid."

"Got a call from my son's teacher because he was out peein' on the playground again. I told him to stop it, but he's just so used to peein' that way at home! How am I supposed to get him to stop? He sees his daddy do it on the front lawn all the time, and so he wants to do it too."

"Oh I hate it when people use hick slang for things. Like my father-in-law, he always says 'up-again.' Like for instance he says 'the ladder is up-again the garage over there.' He always does it!"

"I was born and raised saying 'crick' and not 'creek' and I hate when people out-of-state say 'creek' when they really mean 'crick!'"

"When I was in high school I was everybody's best friend. Everyone always got excited when I walked into class because I was kind of like the class clown, but a cool version of it. So everyone was always happy if I had class with them. I was such a terror! One time I made a substitute teacher cry! I brought some fart spray to class and whenever she had her back turned I would keep spraying the fart spray. Oh it was stinky in there! And the substitute teacher kept saying 'Whoever is doing that had better stop!' but I kept doin' it! And everyone was just cracking up at how funny it was! I'll always remember that."

"One time when we were baking a cake for a football team I got me and the other cheerleaders to spit in it. We were so mad that the moms asked us to bake a cake for the team, so to get revenge I had the idea that we should spit in the cake! So I did and I made my friend do it, too. We laughed so hard when we gave the cake to the boys and they ate it! They told us how good it was, too! Ha ha ha!"

"I never got in trouble at school. Well, except once. But no one ever told me I wasn't supposed to say nigger in school! How was I supposed to know that was a bad word to say in school? My dad said it all the time at home! How was I supposed to know? I was only fifteen!"