Some Proofreading Necessary

B. was sitting at a table in the resource room sharing what he’d put together for a free choice project in his fourth grade class.  He had chosen to create a short slide presentation about TMJ issues that he had been dealing with. You know, problems with the temporomandibular joint.   I knew a bit about B., so while I knew that he was earnest and bright,  I suspected that we were going to have to do a bit of proofreading of his slides.  He can be a bit impulsive.  And temporomandibular is pretty hard to spell.

At first I just asked B. to tell me a bit about the topic.  He related that he’d gone to a doctor last year when he had been experiencing some pain in his ears.  “The doctor put his fingers on the side of my face, next to my ears and he said I had TMJ.”

Then B. explained it to me.  “It’s when your jaw joint gets really sore.”  I had no experience with TMJ, but I suspected that it was a bit more complicated than that.  I asked B. what resources he had used to get ready for this presentation.  He allowed how he basically already knew everything he needed for the presentation, so he didn’t really read much.  He just found some useful pictures.  

With that, we  started reviewing his slides.  He was right, he hadn’t done much reading, and he had found quite a few pictures.  After reading the introduction and the “causes” section, I suggested that we might try to find an article that could help him.  We printed out a short piece from KidsHealth.  We found it on the “parents” tab, so I had to help him with the reading, but it gave him a few facts that he could share.  We highlighted and thought about which section the bits of information might fit into.  

It was when we got to his next slide that things got interesting.  B. had a section where he wanted to show his audience a close-up of the place where the lower jaw met the skull and formed the problematic joint.  

This seemed logical, and since he had been doing this work in Google Slides, it had made perfect sense for him to do a quick image search for that joint.  Using similar logic, B. had typed “joint” in the search window.  He might have needed to narrow that search.

On that next slide, there wasn’t much text, but there were two very large images of two very large joints.  They just weren’t the temporomandibular kind.  They were the cannabis kind.   My eyes may have bugged out a bit.  Then my brain made the connection.  I snorted and bit my lip (thank you KN95).  “Umm, B., why do you have these pictures on this slide?”

“Those are the joints,” B. said, matter of factly.  “But they don’t look like they’re in very good shape.”

Right.  At least one of them looked to be a bit burnt out. I let B.  know (not too bluntly) that those were not human bones in those pictures, and that he might have to refine his search.   

Like I said, a bit of proofreading is always wise.  Otherwise all your hard work and research might just go up in smoke.

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