Weekend
Weekends in the Delta are warm and wonderful. They are my only chance to sleep in, catch up with friends, experience the Delta, and prepare myself for the coming week.
Yesterday I went up to to Marvell, Arkansas, to the Tri-County Fair. It's considerably smaller than the Topsfield Fair, with only about a dozen rides and half that many game booths. But there were animals and some quilts and preserves on display. There were corn-dogs, cotton candy, and sno-cones (I tried the alluring titled, highly recommended "Tiger's Blood," which was very strawberry/cherry). The ultimate attraction of the fair, however, was the Demolition Derby.
In a Demolition Derby, brightly-painted junky old cars with souped-up motores race around a soft-dirt floored arena, crashing into each other in an attempt to cause the most damage possible. The winning car earns about $1500 (enough to cover the cost of the doctor's bill?) and ETERNAL FAME. Evidently, people spend much more than that putting special engines and safety harnesses in the cars. The arena was packed with exactly the sort of people you would expect -- some in overalls, some with mullets, most from the surrounding small towns in poor, rural Southeastern Arkansas. Spirits were high. I didn't actually buy a $10 ticket to go into the arena, but instead stood on the back wall of someone's pickup truck just outside the fence to watch. One car had flames shooting out of a pipe on its hood. Still others never even got started that first time. We could only see a corner of the arena from our vantage point, but there were some fairly big pileups. They can't cause too much damage, though, because they try not to crash head-on (since the point is to cause damage to the other person's car, not your own), and they never have enough space to get to more than about 25 mph.
Today is a solid work day of lesson planning, grading, and preparing to teach my "babies." I'm really excited for this week because I am putting them back into groups (we'll see how THAT goes) and giving them more personal responsibility (i.e. if you're done, you can choose to do x, y, or z, but you need to show me your results).
They love having classroom jobs (we started that two weeks ago). The favorites are the water-bottle keeper (keeps track of and refills my water bottle), the marble manager (counts our marbles to put in the jar), the Super Nova (odd jobs), and the human vacuum cleaner (pick stuff up when I spill it). They also love our poems of the week. Last week's poem was called "Crocodiles" and we did lots of hand motions to go with it. (Crocodiles sun./Crocodiles charge./Crocodiles' teeth/Are very, very large.)
This week, we will be working in groups, reviewing ABC order, learning the names of the nine planets, writing about our friends, practicing the short vowel "i", adding number up to ten, making patterns, and listening attentively to stories read aloud. Yay!
Yesterday I went up to to Marvell, Arkansas, to the Tri-County Fair. It's considerably smaller than the Topsfield Fair, with only about a dozen rides and half that many game booths. But there were animals and some quilts and preserves on display. There were corn-dogs, cotton candy, and sno-cones (I tried the alluring titled, highly recommended "Tiger's Blood," which was very strawberry/cherry). The ultimate attraction of the fair, however, was the Demolition Derby.
In a Demolition Derby, brightly-painted junky old cars with souped-up motores race around a soft-dirt floored arena, crashing into each other in an attempt to cause the most damage possible. The winning car earns about $1500 (enough to cover the cost of the doctor's bill?) and ETERNAL FAME. Evidently, people spend much more than that putting special engines and safety harnesses in the cars. The arena was packed with exactly the sort of people you would expect -- some in overalls, some with mullets, most from the surrounding small towns in poor, rural Southeastern Arkansas. Spirits were high. I didn't actually buy a $10 ticket to go into the arena, but instead stood on the back wall of someone's pickup truck just outside the fence to watch. One car had flames shooting out of a pipe on its hood. Still others never even got started that first time. We could only see a corner of the arena from our vantage point, but there were some fairly big pileups. They can't cause too much damage, though, because they try not to crash head-on (since the point is to cause damage to the other person's car, not your own), and they never have enough space to get to more than about 25 mph.
Today is a solid work day of lesson planning, grading, and preparing to teach my "babies." I'm really excited for this week because I am putting them back into groups (we'll see how THAT goes) and giving them more personal responsibility (i.e. if you're done, you can choose to do x, y, or z, but you need to show me your results).
They love having classroom jobs (we started that two weeks ago). The favorites are the water-bottle keeper (keeps track of and refills my water bottle), the marble manager (counts our marbles to put in the jar), the Super Nova (odd jobs), and the human vacuum cleaner (pick stuff up when I spill it). They also love our poems of the week. Last week's poem was called "Crocodiles" and we did lots of hand motions to go with it. (Crocodiles sun./Crocodiles charge./Crocodiles' teeth/Are very, very large.)
This week, we will be working in groups, reviewing ABC order, learning the names of the nine planets, writing about our friends, practicing the short vowel "i", adding number up to ten, making patterns, and listening attentively to stories read aloud. Yay!
posted by Jessica at 1:55 PM
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