While this is an exciting opportunity for me, it has left me with a problem that is now spread across my entire family room, the problem of what to do with all of my therapy stuff, all 26 years of it. Now, I managed to give away a fair amount to the teachers in my building but there is only just so much of my junk that they were willing to take. So here I sit surrounded by bags and boxes of books, picture cards, toys, and other materials, most of which I created myself.
I am going through box after box trying to sort out what I should keep and what I should toss. And this is just the stuff from my office. It doesn't include the 2 utility shelves of stuff sitting in my basement. I have worked hard all year cleaning out the basement so I am reluctant to put even more stuff down there. I have resigned myself to deal with my mess once and for all.
The first box I opened was a box of therapy games that I had printed, colored, and laminated myself. I remember when I first started working and how I spent hours making all of this stuff. I had the box sitting in my family room for months as I had intended to bring the games to work and start using them again with students. They were simple games that I had used during articulation therapy to distract from the boredom of repeatedly saying the same sound or word over and over again.
One of the first games I made was the game pictured above, the "Find the Squirrel" game. In this game, you had to select a path of footprints, roll the die, and move along the path to the end. Whatever number you rolled on the die was how many steps you could move and also how many words/sounds/etc that you had to say. The first person to the end of the path got to turn over a tree to try and find where the squirrel was hiding. I had glued 4 envelopes on the backs of the trees and hidden a squirrel inside one of them. If you didn't find the squirrel, you had to keep rolling the die and practicing your sound until you finally found it. If I had a group, the first one to find the squirrel was the winner. It was kind of a stupid game if I'm being honest but the students really liked it.
When I opened the box and unearthed this game, I was a bit shocked to see it. I know I made it at the very beginning of my career so it is 20-something years old. I had found the game in an activity book and, judging from the telltale purple splotches on the game pieces, I made them on a Ditto machine. For those of you who were not alive between 1923 when it was invented on through early 1990s, the ditto machine was the precursor to the copy machine. I was working in a Detroit elementary school in 1993 and, while the school did have a copy machine, it was heavily guarded by the building secretary. Many teachers in Detroit at the time had to purchase their own paper to use in the copy machine or pay for copies at a copy center using their own money. Ditto paper was cheap and we had reams of it in our building so the ditto machine was still in heavy use.
Making a copy on a ditto machine was a fairly complex task with many opportunities for failure. To make this game, I had to feed the page from the activity book through a machine called Thermofax. The Thermofax imprinted the game piece images onto a waxy purple master copy. About half the time, the master was blurry and unusable. The master was then attached to the large round drum of the ditto machine and the paper was loaded into the tray underneath. Then you turned it on and the master would rotate around so that it could be dipped into a chemical solution that would transfer the waxy impression of the master onto the blank paper. The copies were printed in purple and even the best copies were hard to read. The machine could make about 40 copies before the waxy ink-like substance on the master was used up. And there was always a risk that the master would wrinkle as it rotated around the drum leaving a giant purple zigzagging line running across the paper like a lightning bolt. Then of course there was the smell. The copies emerged from the machine slightly damp from the solvent with a distinctive slightly sweet chemical smell. I remember sniffing the fresh copies back in elementary school in the 1970s.
After my trees and squirrel came out of the ditto machine, I traced them in black marker and colored them in before driving over the the materials center which happened to be across the street from a huge and very dangerous high-rise public housing project. At the materials center, I laminated the pieces and cut them out. Finally, the game was finished and ready to play. That game traveled to 3 different school districts and spent 3 years in a storage unit before making its way to the basement of my current home. And while many other similar games were unceremoniously dumped into the trash, this game has remained.
So why have I kept it all this time? I guess it brings back memories of the very beginning of my career when I was young and ready to fix all of the communication problems of the world. And even though I have changed so much in the past 26 years, this game represents how much I have stayed the same. At my feet right at this very moment are 2 large bins of materials that I created myself because the store-bought materials that I had purchased over the years were always such a disappointment.
So what is a girl to do with this relic unearthed from the past? I know in my heart that even if this consulting thing doesn't work out and I find myself back in a school, I am not going to use this game ever again. I know that the day will come when it will end up in the trash just like all of the others. For sure it will need to go when I retire and move to a smaller place. I know I should let it go but somehow it is so hard to say goodbye.
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