Bowling

I went bowling with my students Thursday during school. This was an organized trip for all the basic level classes. Since I teach only basic level classes, I figured I might as well go to assist with crowd control. As the bus wasn't leaving until 10:15 that meant that my 8:00 to 9:40 class was in session for that day; or so I thought. When I walked in the room at 7:55 I smelled trouble when there were only two students in the room and neither of them had books or any materials for class. I walked around to the other classes and asked the other teachers if they were having class. The general consensus was, "Yes, but I made sure to remind them they still had class before bowling."

In retrospect, that would've been the thing to do, but I hadn't considered that in the students' minds "any irregularity in the schedule = no class". When I got into the room at 8:00, there were a few more students, but not enough to make it worth my while teaching a class. I figured we could do something on the internet with the SMART board, but it turned out that coincidentally, at that moment the internet was out campus wide. After further consideration, I marked the people who were there as present for both classes and everyone else as absent. The supervisor confirmed that I made the right move and that she would deal with the people who didn't show up.

When we got to the bowling alley, the organizer of the event got the students into their lanes and we began to bowl. I hadn't been given a group beforehand and as it turned out, I was put in charge of the class that likes me the least. I get along with most of my classes, but this is the group that refuses to listen and argues when docked for coming in late. For the most part, the students were pretty good and only got yelled at by the manager of the bowling alley a couple of times for things like bowling in sandals and smashing the ball into the barrier. I a decent warm up game (120) and a better tournament game (139) which were pretty good for me. Apparently, they were really good scores for the students. I had the third best score of our group and we won the tournament. That's not to say that there weren't good bowlers. The top two scores of all the students were 225 and 178. It's just that most of the students sucked at bowling and didn't even have the stamina for two full games.

After bowling, there were the standard burners in the parking lot. I was quite impressed with the amount of rubber laid by a small hatchback. My supervisor wasn't as impressed and noted that it was someone from the winning team. I found that out when I went into her office today to complain about a particular student who continually disrupts class. She seemed particularly interested in my description of the guy. While she wasn't excited at the prospect of issuing a written waring to the guy, she seemed happy to have the matter of the squealing tires and a disruptive student wrapped up in a nice neat package. That's one thing I honestly appreciate about our school: the support of the supervisors.