She was known
for being a bad highlighter.
She would
highlight everything.
She told us she
highlighted only
what she felt
was important but it seems
she felt
everything was important.
The academic
team would sit around and
have
conversations about how to address
Talisha’s
highlighting problem.
Do we keep her
away from team materials?
Do we have an
intervention? Someone suggested
giving her two
differently colored highlighters,
in an attempt
to teach her the difference
between
selective highlighting and a free-for all.
Turns out, two
highlighters made her problems
worse. We were
finally forced to agree
that we’d all
just have to accept Talisha’s
highlighting
issues, because we needed her.
She was our
regional Teen Jeopardy champion,
and was the
only one who knew anything about
Victorian
Literature.
Sometimes, when
I hear stories about other
people’s teen
years, I feel like they are talking
about some
exotic country,
one I know I’ll
never visit: the slang they used,
the boys they
kissed, the nights they snuck out,
the parents
they’d upset,
all the things
they had to worry about
and all the
things that they never ever ever
had to worry
about.