I made it to the gym today to meet with a trainer that they provide. The gentleman was young enough to be my son. He asked some initial screening questions. The month of October came up in my history, and he asked if that was number nine. I didn’t know what he meant at first. Then, I realized he was referring to the number of the month in the calendar. I said October was the tenth month. Okay, odd I thought that he didn’t know that, but we kept going. Some time went by, and he needed to file my gym folder into a filing cabinet alphabetically. I realized that he couldn’t do that. He placed “Dozier” in front of “Doran”. I helped him file it correctly, but my short time with this (high school grad now in community college) kid left me wondering not only about him but the rest of the kids out there. These first grade skills of knowing the months of the year and basic dictionary skills were unknown to him. Now, I don’t know his history. Maybe he has a learning disorder or some awful brain injury in his past. I hope not, but let’s say for argument’s sake that he has nothing in his history that would have been an obstruction to acquiring knowledge of such basic elementary skills. If that’s the case, then his lack of knowledge is frustrating to me as an educator of the next generation. Maybe I’m making a mountain out of a molehill. Maybe I’m not..