This week

10-11-05

The first wisps of snow floated to the ground in Nome today. Most of it barely stuck to the ground. It felt cold today, that kind of cold I remember from Chicago. I think the high temperature here today was only about 35 degrees.

Let’s see, NFL picks. I apparently either don’t know what I’m doing or Amy is a really good guesser. Amy picked the week too. Going into Monday’s game we were both tied at seven correct picks. I correctly picked Pittsburgh to beat San Diego on Monday, so I end up 8-6. That’s only one better than Amy at 7-7.

School is school. We are starting sentence diagramming and I do races with it. They race up to the board in teams and correctly diagram sentences. It is a great way to reinforce what they’re doing instead of boring worksheets.

Do you know the one thing that students say that really get my goat? The one thing that makes me lose my temper above anything else? “Whatever.” When students say, “Whatever” when you are trying to correct them, they have no idea how disrespectful it sounds. It’s a dismissal of what I as a teacher am saying that feels one step below if they told me to “Shut up.”

We get to go to Bethel, Alaska, on Friday. There will be many teams there including Bethel, and the villages of Aniak, Chevak, Kalskag, and Akiachak. Dillingham flaked out on us, but we are going to Dillingham in a few weeks. We are taking a charter flight on Bering Air on a nineteen-seater plane, all to ourselves. We actually have to tell the players that they need to wear onto the plane their winter gear, including hat, boots, gloves, and snow pants. We literally can’t let them on the plane without it. It’s in case we do crash because we would be out in the wilderness for hours before any type of rescue.