New season, new coach, new team.
Hoping it will all turn out alright.
Spring 2023 Soccer
general
Curriculum Night
Tonight, I took the Boy to curriculum night at his zoned middle school. We're still not sure if he's going to the charter middle school L attended (he's grandfathered in) or if he's going to the zoned public school. Right now he's leaning toward the latter: he's interested in music, and he wants to play in band, which is not something the charter school offers.
We spoke to the band director for a while, talked to the strings teacher, looked at the instruments, talked about the advantages of each.
"I think I'm leaning to this school," he said.
"My only concern," I said, "is that the academics at this school won't be at quite the level as the charter school."
The Boy expressed that he's okay with that, suggesting once again that he's not such a smart guy as someone who needs those "high-level classes."
K and I don't know where this idea comes from. He gets great grades; he scores well on standardized tests -- he just doesn't see himself as a gifted person, certainly not as a thinker. He sees himself as perfectly academically average.
He couldn't be more different than his sister...
Baking
Gallery Walk
Decent?
K, on the evening: "Good time at the Y, good movie, decent beer..."
Someone's turned into a beer snob!
Playoffs
Lit Circles
My most challenging, most rewarding, and therefore favorite class really nailed it today.
Rings
Teaching as Consequence
This quarter, I have hall duty, which means I keep an eye on the kids who arrive early and have to sit for half an hour in the hall before school starts. With over 300 eighth-grade students in the school, it would get very loud very quickly if we didn't keep them quiet, so we have a whisper-only rule.
There's only one problem: many of the kids don't know how to whisper.
"I am whispering!" they'll protest after they've been speaking in hushed tones (but definitely not whispering) to friends.
"No, whispering doesn't mean just talking quietly."
Tired of telling kids over and over what whispering means, and knowing of course that they did indeed know (or at least most of them), I enlisted the help today of The Whisperers, kids who I'd called down for talking who had a choice: either take a signature on the school discipline card (the ROCK card), or teach a lesson during advisory on how to whisper.
They chose the second option.
First House
The last time L and I were in Rock Hill for a volleyball tournament, and Papa was still alive, I managed to find the first house I remember living in, the house Nana and Papa owned when they brought me home.
In the front was the same railroad-tie planter that Papa had built decades and decades ago, sometime in 1976 or 1977 I would imagine: I say this because I remember him building it, in vague, hazy memories that might be more the product of suggestion than actual memories.
When Nana passed away and I was going through all the old photos we'd taken from their condo, I found one of us cousins in front of that house. I'm on the little horse toy toward the far right; that's my cousin C behind me. This was from a family reunion that we had at our house. I remember a family reunion there, so it must have been a second one: I'm far too young in this picture to remember anything from that time.
From the same series of pictures is one of my grandparents: Papa's father is on the far left; Papa's mother is the only woman in the foreground.
And yet another one from that day, this time on someone's motorcycle. I'm not sure whose, and I'm not sure it was the owner posing with me in this shot, and I'm not sure who the man in the picture is. These are all just things that exist in my past but not in my memory.
And the obvious move: what pictures will have this same effect on my own children? Probably none -- their lives are so completely documented here that they would have no problem figuring out who was holding them on a motorcycle...