Field Trips and Other Random Tidbits

In 3rd grade the kids here learn about local history, so on Thursday I had the chance to chaperone an all day, all local field trip with Alex's class. We took the bus downtown and were given a list of 90 things to see in downtown K-town. We walked around town for 7 hours and then walked back to the school. We found all but 5 of the things on our list and even learned some things. Did you know Orson Welles was from here? I didn't, but we saw his birthplace. According to my fitbit bracelet, we walked 8 miles and none of the kids in my group complained even once. It was 70 degrees and we had a perfect day.

I didn't bring a camera so thank goodness for phones because these kids kept asking me to take their picture.






 








On Friday I had the chance to walk with Chloe's class to the beach and spend the entire day playing. Once again we had perfect weather and we could not have had more fun, although I have a whole new respect for teachers. I could not do that all day every day. I was constantly counting to make sure I had everyone and they have so much energy that they wear you right out.






 
Chloe was the jump roping champion. Everyone else got about two jumps and she could just jump and jump and jump. It is hard to tell in these pictures, but she is also very tall. Some kid in another class told her she couldn't play because this field trip was only for Kindergarten. Alyssa was the shortest one in her Kinder class and Chloe is easily the tallest. I love that I caught her mid-jump. In the bright sunlight I could never see my screen so the pics were all a surprise to me when I got home.


We also had Chloe's dance recital this weekend, but I will give that its own post. While I am here though, here are a few other pics that were still buried in my phone.

The kids had a lemonade stand. We live on a dead end street so it was slow going. I think2 hours passed before their first customer. They ended up making about $15 in the end though.
 
This is just Chloe being Chloe!
 
They had a Kindergarten fundraiser where the kids decorated a pizza box for a local pizza company and if you ordered pizza that night it was delivered in their box.
 
 
Alex had a piece of his artwork displayed in the local museum again this year.  
 
The Father and Son outing was on Friday night. For girls night in the girls wanted to stay home and have Arby's. Okay, whatever! They enjoyed their silly kids meal headbands. 
 
Chloe's hair is in a bun because she also had dress rehearsal that night. 




 

Since I detoured from the field trip theme of this post, allow me to detour some more and throw in a few other updates.

I am still struggling with my English class. I worked with the teacher and revised my last paper 5 times. That is unheard of for me. To be honest, I usually hand in my first draft but I was trying to learn and improve. She still says I can't do things that I think I can...like not linking a list of words with "and". I say you can leave the and out sometimes to make it flow better. The and can be stifling, in my opinion. She also hates vague pronouns and would rather that I use the same word twice in one sentence than to use the word "they" or "us". So I made some concessions and I worked really hard to get every comma in the right place and I aced the grammar section but she still gave me a 96 overall. This time her feedback was so brutal that it actually really hurt. The only thing she liked was the title. Seriously! After that she annihilated it. She even said it wasn't even a proper I believe paper, which is strange because she never said that while we were working together during the week and this is the same paper the writing lab called one of the best papers they had ever read.I am jumping through hoops and I can't win with this woman. She says my writing is too personal, too conversational, too dramatic, too poetic. Oh excuse me...AND too poetic. The papers were love letters and personal belief letters. I thought they called for that? I have realized that she just hates my style of writing. I am okay with that. Not everyone will like what you do, but if you are going to give people a 96 on a paper then you should have something nice to say about it, right? I would love for a teacher to help me improve my voice, but she just wants to teach me to write in her voice. From here on out, I will not be rewriting papers 5 times each. It won't help. My next paper is persuasive and I thought about writing about the merit of creative writing. Do you think that would go over well? She has told me that good writers can make their message fit within the rules and I think I will argue that people who hold too tightly to the rules, do so to compensate for a failure to be able to use words. Alright, that was snarky, but my feelings are hurt. I will now check my pride and go back to phoning it in until I meet a teacher who actually wants to help me improve. Oh, in case you think I just can't take criticism...I beg my peer groups to be more critical. Seriously beg them! I want to get better. I want to learn to break out of my niche and use my voice to appeal to a more universal crowd. I am all for constructive criticism, but I consider destructive criticism to be completely inappropriate from an academic professional.

And one last update...I got a job! For real, I did. My friend has worked for Hallmark as a retail merchandiser for years and I asked her to tell me if she ever planned to quit because it sounded like something that would fit in to my schedule. She is moving to NY and my friend Lisa, who also worked there, is also quitting, so I applied. I will only work 7-10 hours a week and it is at my own convenience. I just have to go to 5 locations (4 grocery stores and a post office) each week and stock their Hallmark products and reorder where necessary. It will scarcely make a dent in our checking account but I figured it was a way to get my foot back in the workplace while still going to school and chauffeuring kidlets around.

I will let you breathe for a minute now and come back later and show you cute Chloe at her ballet recital.