you take a pause

"The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning. Punctuation herds words together, keeps others apart. Punctuation directs you how to read, in the way musical notation directs a musician how to play."
Today as I was helping Demi-Sky with his math, we came upon a sequencing problem. You know the kind- a number, a comma, a few blank spaces with commas and then a few more numbers to show you what they are skip-counting by or if they are counting backwards...
Demi paused in his deep-thought-driven number writing to tell me,
"the comma means you take a breath."

The type of learning that comes effortlessly, like breathing- never ceases to amaze me.
-don't get me wrong, we have plenty of the other kind of learning....

Speaking of pauses, I had to...er, was gifted the opportunity to run through a piece of music with Meg in front of her violin teacher. I've always been music counting-challenged...I took those strings of 8th notes and ran straight through them...
uh, yes ma'am...I could use more practice I guess.
My plan is to mutter "pepperoni-pizza" over and over again and watch what Meg is doing.
I think it will work.
or maybe I'll draw in big florescent comma's all over the music where I need to pause...