Another Shot from Table Rock
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Table Rock
Final Soccer
It’s been a tough season: our team has one win and who knows how many losses. Each Saturday, we head out, and I tell the Boy to do his best, to enjoy the game, to keep his chin up no matter the outcome, to tell him that they can indeed win because they have done it before — and I convince myself of it. And then three, five, seven minutes into the game, the other team scores its first goal, and I immediately turn pessimistic.
Today was no different. Within the first half of the first half, we were down 0-3. We stopped the hemorrhaging and even scored a goal to enter the half-time break down 1-3.
Then I hear from the couple sitting beside me, “Oh no. No. Dear God, no.” I look up and see that their son is putting on the goalie jersey. This is their son’s first year playing, and like many kids, he’s not particularly athletic. But he wants to play, and he does the best he can. His parents cheer him on continually, and the other boys on the team are supportive as well. “I love my son,” the other said, “but he doesn’t throw himself in front of anything.” Yet the boys hold it together fairly well, letting two more goals in while scoring two more themselves to end 3-5.
After our third goal, one of the parents from the other team became irate. “Call the illegal throw!” he screamed. I didn’t see that our boys had done anything illegal, but he apparently thought they had. I glanced over to see a fairly muscular tattooed man with bulging veins in his neck as he yelled “Call the illegal throw!” again.
What a jerk, I thought. What a way to set an excellent example: yell at the ref who is himself a high-school-aged kid. How embarrassing.
Eventually, he calmed down, but he continued making remarks about the ref and how our boys weren’t following the rules.
I wanted to walk over to him and say, “Look, man, it’s a game. They’re kids; the ref is a kid; your kid’s team is up by 2 — calm yourself and stop making an ass of yourself.” Of course, that would have made me just as bad as he in many ways, and nothing good could come of a confrontation like that.
It turns out, though, that this was the opponents’ first win of the season. That makes us tied as far as records go…
View from Babia
Scouting
Family Festival
Old Pictures
E will be working on a Veterans’ Day Project that pays tribute to Papa and his service in the Navy. I got to wondering what old pictures we have of Papa, so I began searching. One thing led to another and I was on ancestry.com, checking on the family tree I’d worked on in the past. And I noticed a few pictures I could add to flesh out the Polish side of our family tree.
Region Champions
As of tonight, it’s official: the Girl’s varsity volleyball team are region champions. We didn’t play a game to settle it: it was a matter of whether another team lost or not. Technically, it wasn’t: our team was forced to forfeit against Woodmont because of having played too many games this season. (Apparently, that’s a rule.) If Woodmont had won tonight, they would have had the same record as Mauldin but because of the forfeit score (three sets of 25-0), they would have won because total points come into play in the event of a tie.
We’d played Woodmont earlier this year, and as with every other regional game, our girls took the game in straight sets. We would have undoubtedly done it again last Thursday were the girls not forced to forfeit, and honestly, everyone in the region probably realizes this as well: our girls are that good.
And so we’re into the playoffs, with the hope of winning the state championship in three weeks.
Looking Glass
Around the House and More
Parkour
Forfeit
Does a win count as a win if an outside power forces a team to forfeit? Does the loss count as a loss? Do the standings afterward in any way reflect reality?
Socratic Seminar
They’re tough classes at times, filled with a mix of students with mixed motivations and mixed ability levels. And all of this manifests itself in students’ behavior: several students are focused and hardworking while a few are determined to gain attention by any means necessary, with the vast majority simply there, engaged sometimes, bored and checked out others.
But there’s one activity that always gets good results: Socratic Seminars.
If I could have these on a biweekly basis, I think I could have a serious motivator for the students. So why don’t I do it? That’s a very good question, indeed. I shall be working them into plans one way or another on a much more regular basis based on how well students engaged in their first seminar of the year.
And I haven’t even done one with my honors students yet…
Senior Night
The varsity girls won in straight sets tonight. Again.
It was senior night, though, so there were a few more students there than usual.
Autumn Walk
When I took the dog out for a walk tonight, I forgot for the who-knows-how-many-th time about the Halloween house up the street from us. The kitsch-fill yard that amounts to little more than hundreds (no exaggeration) of plastic Halloween characters all lined up shoulder to shoulder. There’s no thought to it, no attempt to create any kind of little scenes throughout the yard — just a bunch of plastic all lined up.
And it scares poor Clover to death every time we walk by there and one of the animated ones starts moving and talking.
Black Balsam Knob
We took a quick drive (well, not quick for the Boy — it was two hours) over to the Blue Ridge Parkway for an afternoon hike today. The Girl stayed home because she had volleyball practice — open gym for the club team she’s signed with this year. And she doesn’t really like hiking. And she’s almost 16 and is starting to have her own life — though it pains me to admit it. How did she get so big so fast?
Be all that as it may, we headed a little further south on the Parkway than we usually go and ended up hiking along ridges with gorgeous views.
K took some pictures with her phone.
We both took some pictures with the Nikon.
And we arrived home exhausted and hungry.
“We really should do this more often,” K said.
Homecoming
Almost Full
Scouting
New Student
We have a new student as of today. She doesn’t speak much English at all. The language she does speak — there’s only one person in the whole school who speaks it. Her sister. Who speaks less English than she does. What did four young ladies do when she arrived in my English class? Swarm around her with welcoming smiles and helped her the entire class period.
It was hard not to feel a little hope for humanity glancing over at them as they worked through today’s assignment.