Matching Tracksuits

Month: October 2020

Close Call

Monday 12 October 2020

The Girl’s volleyball team finished the regular season with a perfect record. Beyond perfect — not only did they win every match but the won them all in straight sets. Which is to say they lost not a single set. And most sets they won convincingly. Brutally.

Today was the semifinals of the year-end tournament.

Before the game, there was a special short recognition of the eighth-grade girls who would be leaving. “As you can see,” said the coach, “they’re the majority of the team.” Next year will likely not see as many in the win column as this year. But it’s still this year.

The girls made it straight to the semifinals due to their record, and they faced St. Mary’s today. They won convincingly earlier this year in the regular season. And the first set today they won easily: 25-9. That’s not just an easy win. That’s a brutal beat-down. But the St. Mary’s girls never let it get to them. They were enthusiastic and hard-working the entire set as the lead mounted and become the monster that it was.

In the second set, the Langston girls started getting sloppy, making some silly errors. Before we knew it, they were down by four, almost all the points coming from their own unforced errors. Still, I don’t want to take anything away from the St. Mary’s team: they were playing much better in the second set. Our girls cut the lead to one and then started slipping again. Cut the lead and then started slipping again. And then the unthinkable: set point.

Yet the girls rallied and kept their perfect record just that.

It would have been a great surprise for the St. Mary’s girls to bump the big dogs off their perch (I just intentionally mixed those metaphors so thoroughly that you could serve them to James Bond).

“Did you hear? The Langston girls finally got taken down!”

“Really? By whom?”

But it was not meant to be, I suppose.

One more game — the championship on Friday afternoon against Shannon Forest again. They almost took a set from the girls a couple of weeks ago, and in the 2019/2020 season, they took a set from the Langston girls each of the two matches they played. Including the championship.

In the evening, after dinner, the Boy and I worked on his scout project. We measured and cut all the boards, ready for assembly tomorrow.

The End of What?

Sunday 11 October 2020

Press Release - Radio Interview with David C. PackJust a little over a week ago, religious huckster and conman David Pack said that Jesus would be coming back by the end of his group’s little religious retreat known as the Feast of Tabernacles. He was absolutely sure it would happen during that convention, and in a sermon leaked onto the internet that he gave during the first day, he said he would be shocked if they made it halfway through the conference before Jesus returned. As Wednesday rolled into Thursday, marking the halfway mark, I wondered what he was saying to his flock. “Just wait — I know it’s coming!” Who knows.

Well, the whole conference is over. Everyone was heading back to their homes today despite Pack’s assurance during his first-day sermon that they wouldn’t be going back home. Are they finally beginning to doubt the man? Are they going to leave his group?

The fallout will be interesting to watch, but it certainly is not without tragedy. Members of this group have given everything to this man. They’ve signed over their homes to them. They’ve taken out loans to send him the money. As with the Branch Davidians or the People’s Temple, they’ve surrendered their whole lives to this man in the belief that he is God’s appointed one on Earth, an apostle on the same level as the New Testament apostles. I don’t think they will end with a firey confrontation with government officials or in a mass suicide, but that doesn’t make the tragedy insignificant: anyone who leaves this church would have to start all over. I’m not even sure they could stay in their houses if they signed them over to the church.

Misunderstanding

Sunday 11 October 2020

When creationists try to present the “lie of evolution” in an attempt to debunk it, we can often see clearly that the creationists don’t even understand evolutionary theory.

“Who’s going to make who look like an idiot?” Given the fact that you just clearly showed that you don’t have a clue how evolution works, you’ve already made an idiot of yourself.

They’re positively quixotic.

Already

Saturday 10 October 2020

Went to Lowe’s this morning for a new wax ring for a toilet. Walked in and saw this. This is two and a half months before Christmas. We have not only Thanksgiving to go but Halloween as well…

Lena in the rain# love it

Friday 9 October 2020

The Boy wrote this post, playing with hashtags — he doesn’t quite understand them yet.

Scouts

Thursday 8 October 2020

Coming home from scouts tonight, the Boy and I had a conversation about friendship. He talked to me a bit about what happened to Malfoy in the third book of the Harry Potter series, which K is currently reading to him. Apparently he got mauled by some creature.

“Oh, that’s not good,” I said.

Practicing his two half-hitches

“But Malfoy is bad!” E clarified.

“Yes, but that’s no reason to wish ill of him. Besides, he might not turn out that bad by the end of it all.” I knew this from conversations I’d had with L about the series, but I didn’t want to give anything away to the boy.

“Yeah, L told me that he and Harry become friends in the end.”

Learning how to use a handsaw

So much for not giving it away.

“That’s sort of like T and me,” the Boy continued. “We didn’t use to like each other. Well, we really didn’t know each other, but then we got to know each other and decided to become friends.”

I thought about that for a moment, pondering the choice of words: “decided” to become friends. I imagined this conversation between the two boys, a negotiation of sorts.

It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it?

T might not even be aware that in E’s eyes, they “decided” to become friends. For all I know, T might not even consider E his friend but merely an acquaintance.

Sawing

Kids and adults see friendship differently, I think. I feel I’m more jaded than I can imagine him ever being. That’s the magic of childhood, I guess.

Streaming

Wednesday 7 October 2020

It’s taken a while to get everything lined up, to get everything prepared, to get all the kids set and expecting it, but today, I finally pulled it off.

I live-streamed my classes so that students at home could simply follow along. I used a bone-conduction blue tooth headset to hear questions from the online kids and to make sure they heard me clearly, and I presented the screen through Google Meet so they could simply follow along with the text as we annotated it. (And one of the administrators, knowing I was doing this, dropped by to take some pictures, which made it to social media.)

In the past, we’ve had material prepared for kids at home and material prepared for kids in school. I’ve been teaching doubled lessons: I teach the same thing on Monday to the students who attend Monday and Wednesday then I repeat it all Tuesday for the other group. But no more.

The parental response has been completely positive and overwhelmingly uniform:

  • This was great…my son really liked this
  • THIS IS AWESOME!! Would love to see y’all make this happen!!!
  • This was excellent! The most positive school response I’ve seen from my daughter since Covid began.
  • I have wondered from the beginning why this wasn’t done for every class.
  • Rave reviews from my 8th grader!
  • This was a huge help. Thank you, Mr. Scott! Would love to see this happen for additional classes.

So two things now come to mind:

  1. I must plan all my lessons so that they can fit into such a template. (Or almost all my lessons. I don’t know about Socratic seminars and other forms of discussion, but perhaps it’s do-able with a little ingenuity.)
  2. I must talk several teachers off the ledge when word starts getting around that this is going to be required (it won’t) and that it’s terribly complicated (it isn’t) and that it will require much more planning time (much less, actually).

Finally, it’s proved one thing to me as well: snow days are now completely obsolete.

Versus Shannon Forest

Monday 5 October 2020

The girls knew from the start of the season that today’s match would be the biggest challenge. They faced Shannon Forest in the regular season and in the championship last year, and while they won both matches, they went to three sets, and each match was a real battle.

Today, when I arrived, I glanced at the scoreboard and saw our girls were down 15-10. Other than a few moments at the beginning of this or that set, it’s about the only time they’ve been behind, and certainly the only time they’d been that far behind that far into the game. They would pull back within two points or so and then lose another two points.

I didn’t think their undefeated streak would win — I thought they’d win the final two sets if they lost the first one. They just weren’t playing 100%. And to their credit, their opponents were making phenomenal saves. They didn’t have as many heavy hitters as we do, but they took most of the serves and many of the hits and converted them. Still, I thought the girls’ perfect season (and by that, I mean not a single set lost) might end this afternoon. In the end, though, they came back to win it 25-22.

The second set started off with our girls jumping into an early, big lead of 7-1. With a lead like that, which they maintained for most of the game (at one point it was 20-12), I thought it was a done deal. The girls of Shannon Forest had other plans, though. One thing everyone has to give those SF girls is that they never give up. Down eight points, with our girls lacking only 5 points to victory while they had to double their score and then some, they still fought for every ball. And they started clawing back. And soon it was 21-17. And I thought, “They might do to our girls what our girls just did to them.” But it seemed impossible: our girls are good. They can take the hits, pop them up to the setter, who sets up one of three frontline hitters, who can then almost always hit well and often hit with incredible power and speed.

With every point, the home team scored, the home crowd erupted. The SF girls danced and screamed with each point as they pulled it back to 23-22. I could understand their joy: the Langston girls were the big dogs, so to speak. They’d rolled through the season last year and took the championship. They were doing the same this year. To take them down, to take one set — I’ve been in that position. Not in sports but in academic bowl competitions. In the final match of the year, our team took down an until-then undefeated team.

Just one point down.

But it was not to be. They made a couple of errors, and we had a good hit or two, and it was all over. Our perfect season is still perfect, with one more match tomorrow night.

In the championship tournament, though, Shannon Forest will likely meet our girls again. And they will remember how they began that first set. And they will be out for revenge.

Learning

Sunday 4 October 2020

“Hey, there’s a grass volleyball tournament in town this weekend. Want to go play?” L asked.

“Sure,” her best friend N replied.

That’s how it started. So two good friends who both have a couple years’ experience playing volleyball but no experience playing two-girl volleyball — no experience at all, not just no experience playing together in pairs volleyball — set out this morning to see how they’d do.

It was a learning experience, to say the least.

Not only did they not win a single set, their total points scored for six sets (54) didn’t even average out to 10 points per game. To say they got their butts kicked is really quite an understatement.

It’s not something she’s used to in volleyball. Last year, her school’s team won every single match and only dropped three or four sets the entire season. This year, with only two matches remaining, they haven’t lost a single set. They are used to delivering the smackdown, not receiving it.

But it wasn’t always like that either for the Girl. When she first started playing volleyball, she tried out for the school team in sixth grade and didn’t make the cut. We put her in YMCA volleyball and her team didn’t do well at all.

As a parent watching my daughter play volleyball, I always have some mixed emotions. During the last season, her team struggled mightily: they didn’t win a single match, if memory serves, and they only won a handful of sets. It was rough. Lots of frustration in the car after games.

“We won’t ever win.”

Several matches, they were swept, three sets to nothing. There was nothing immediately redeemable about that. I said what any parent would say: “You’re getting stronger.” “This is building character.” “This shows how tough you are, that you keep at it despite the challenges.” (Source)

Still, even then they weren’t getting beaten brutally.

Today, they were. Completely outclassed. Completely and mercilessly beaten by girls who had much more experience than they do.

Point after point, set after set, game after game, they kept playing. They lost by scores like 21-7 and kept playing. They made silly mistakes and went for several points without actually earning a point but gaining points only from unforced errors and still, they kept playing.

I’m not sure when I was prouder of L.

As the morning progressed, they improved. They figured out some of the little strategic differences that pairs volleyball demands. They worked together more. Their game became a little more analytic. They grew.

What’s more, when we asked the girls if they’d enjoyed it, they insisted they’d had fun. And I believe them. So a successful lesson on many levels.

1978

Thursday 1 October 2020