First, I’d just like to say - I’ve had caffeine this morning. Lots of it. I was up at 4:30am to take friends to the airport, and have overcompensated with the coffee. When I was little my dad told me I was like a Chatty Cathy doll with a broken string. Caffeine kind of enhances that.

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Last week at puppy class, the instructor was using Lucy in a demonstration (clearly of what not to do), and I realized I hadn’t turned my phone off. I pulled it out of my bag and Nicole leaned over and whispered “Calling the shelter to tell them you’ve changed your mind?”

And then last night, she was up for demonstration again and I picked up my bag to get something out and Nicole pointed to the other side of the room and whispered “Going for a quick getaway? I think you can scale that wall over there.”

The three of us and our mutts have totally become THOSE kids in class. We are usually picked first (if the instructor wants to show “even difficult dogs will eventually get it” or last if she wants to get the easy dogs out of the way before she works with us. We have special needs dogs.

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Speaking of special needs. I was talking to my sister the other day (that didn’t start well… but follow me) about how we learned to count when we were little. Our teacher used ‘dots’, and I catch myself counting the invisible dots, or tapping them out on my desk, even to this day. How it worked was the teacher had pictures of the numbers posted on the wall, and they all had a dot on them corrosponding to that number. So the number “1″ had one dot, the number “2″ had two dots, etc. The dots were in logical places on the number (the number “1″ had a dot on the top of the line, the number two had a dot on each end of the line that makes up the two… actually, it’s too hard to explain, so I found a picture - look here). Anyway. I Googled it yesterday to see if it was a normal teaching method and apparently it is. For “intellectually disabled children.” Greeeeaaaaaat.

“There is considerable evidence that many intellectually disabled children have difficulty learning the basic operations of arithmetic. Our research has indicated that some such children are unable to learn the most basic operation, addition, without the use of concrete referents such as blocks, tokens or fingers. … We have been studying the potential of a dot-notation approach to the teaching of addition. When adding, the student initially learns to count the positions of dots embedded in numerals from 1 to 9. With practice, the child learns to count the positions of the dots so that the actual dots can be removed. This approach can be adapted to the four operations and allows special needs children to appear to do arithmetic like everyone else which should make them feel more at ease and be more accepted when being mainstreamed into regular classes. More…“