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Our oldest grandson, Christian, is in the 6th grade at Christ Community Lutheran School on the Kirkwood campus. Yesterday Steve Templeton, one of the weathermen on KMOV paid a visit to talk about weather and especially slow motion lightning. That topic got all of them excited and interested and it is pretty incredible. Here is a photo he took of the kids. Christian is right in the middle in red shirt and glasses.
click to enlarge
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When I first began teaching at Bloom High School in Chicago Heights, I was more than a little surprised to learn that boys had to take swimming classes in the nude. Girls did not. The high school I went to in the western suburbs of Chicago did not have a pool, it had a huge hole dug for a future pool which was never constructed. So I was a bit in the dark on how most Chicago area gym classes handled swimming.
But as it turned out almost every Chicago high school with a pool made boys take classes naked. This was standard procedure for decades, only ending sometime in the 70's. I was reminded of this weird practice by a story from WBEZ radio in Chicago as an answer to a listener question on "Why did Chicago boys swim naked in high school? How did that start and why did it stop?"
The answer rather defies belief in this day and age and was the cause of a lot of undo embarrassment for many boys during those years. Dale will occasionally relive how much he hated swimming class because of that rule.
The explanation for this goes back to the 1920's when people were obsesses with fighting disease and promoting personal hygiene. "Health officials worried that allowing potentially dirty fabrics into public pools could introduce germs, and bacteria-killing pool chlorination had still not been perfected."
Also some swim suits were made of wool and fibers could clog the filtration system.
This reason doesn't explain why it continued long after suits became non fibrous and chlorine killed bacteria. And it never did explain why girls never had to do this except for this hilarious but somewhat creepy answer from an old coach:
"Girls are just more modest than boys.
“When you look at a female’s body, there are more things that are showing than on males,” he says. “Females had breasts and everything, so they were able to cover that because females like to hide a lot of things, whereas on boys there’s only one thing and everyone had the same thing.”
There is a lot more to this story at the link, a story many would rather not ever have to remember.
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The kids at Christ Community Lutheran School where our grandsons attend had quite a first week. The first day of school saw everyone in a lock down right as the day began because of a bank robber loose in that neighborhood. The second day of school ended during a torrential rain storm which tied up the roads and byways for several hours.
But yesterday was the topper, at least for me. Christian's soccer team was to head outside for practice after school when that event was cancelled due to copperhead snakes on the field.
You just can't make this up.
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The 2017 National Spelling Bee ended last night with Ananya Vinay of Fresno, California taking home a cash prize of $40,000 "after 12 hours of picking her way along a precarious lifeline of consonants and vowels."
A perfect description of the National Spelling Bee. The words these kids are given to spell stretches our credibility. Come on, people, these are not actual words real people ever use. Her final, winning word, was Marocain which was defined as "a dress fabric made of warp of silk or rayon and a filling of other yarns." I don't even understand that definition. What is a warp?
Other words contestants received and spelled correctly were: Cheirotompholyx, durchkomponiert and tchefuncte. Others missed these words among others: Corriedale, toreutics, cleidoic and panettone.
I mean, seriously. Come on.
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A Tennessee high school senior girl wrote an essay which got her into Yale University. Essays are normally required with many college applications and the essay question for Yale was, " a 200-words or less essay about what you love to do."
Her immediate thought about what she loved to do was order pizza from Papa Johns and that is what she wrote. "Putting aside worries her essay topic would seem “silly,”Carolina Williams wrote about how ordering from the pizza chain gave her independence as a child and was used as both a source of consolation and celebration as she grew up."
This unusual essay tickled the admissions people and one wrote a note to her saying, "As a fellow lover of pizza, I laughed out loud (then ordered pizza) after reading your application". Another admission person wrote “I laughed so hard on your pizza essay. I kept thinking that you are the kind of person that I would love to be best friends with."
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Last night the students at Holy Cross Lutheran School in Collinsville put on a concert celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. They were dressed in medieval costumes and provided music which included singing, string and band instruments, and handbells. The hallways had medieval games to play.
This game, the name of which I've forgotten, involved rolling a ball of some kind around the pretend village green.
There were castle backdrops and of course, an lifesize Martin Luther.
Two of our grandsons came over to watch and help at the Concordia Publishing House table on which were giveaways and things for sale having to do with the Reformation.
Esther, the church's Comfort Dog was also in attendance.
At the conclusion music director Karen Shimkus was given a bouquet of roses.
And our boys had their picture taken with mom and John Shimkus
A great night and a terrific idea.
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Thursday and Friday were set aside for grandparents day at our grandsons' school. They are now on two different campuses so Dale went for Connor's day and I went yesterday for Christian. There were activities in each classroom, chapel and the chance to take the grandchild out for lunch. What I was amazed at was what we learned in Christian's math class.
The teacher has a program on his iPad which allows him to immediately see everyone's answers and know who got them right and who didn't. I don't know if I can explain this perfectly but here goes. The problem or question is put on a digital screen which hangs on the chalkboard. Each child comes up with an answer at his desk. Sometimes it's multiple choice sometimes just one answer. When everyone is done with all the math problems the teacher tells them to get out their Plickers Cards which look like this:
If you click to enlarge the picture you'll see that the image has a number on each corner which corresponds to an individual child. Also letters A, B, C, and D on the sides. Those letters correspond to the multiple choice answers. The black portion is on a shiny white laminated paper of some kind.
When everyone has finished the assignment the teacher picks up his iPad and tells the class to hold up their Plicker and he walks across the front of the room and as he does, the iPad program somehow reads each child's answer as A,B,C,or D and records whether it is right or wrong. For instance, he let us play along by putting up a couple of multiple choice questions and gave each of us one of the Plickers. One question was "when you were in 5th grade what did you want to be when you grew up?" There were 4 choices-ABCD. D was "none of the above".
Then he had one of his students walk across the front of the room while holding the iPad in front of him and it recorded all the answers. In this case the teacher had the answers form a graph which showed up on the digital screen on the chalkboard. This blew me away. 90 percent of the grandparents answered "none of the above" for the choices. He did this a couple more times with other questions. I loved this.
Here's Dale with Connor in is classroom. They worked on word and number sheets.
They went to lunch at Steak N Shake
Then not to be outdone, Christian and I took a selfie.
And we went to lunch at Qdoba which was right across the street from CCLS Kirkwood campus.
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Yesterday I went over to Holy Cross in Collinsville with two of our seminary students who work part time in the communications department. This department does most of the work involved with publicity in all forms and students are excellent photographers. The school is celebrating Lutheran School Week and as this is also the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, staff wanted to do something which involved everyone. it was decided to attempt to have all the kids form the Luther Seal in the gym. This seal is synonymous with Luther.
All the classes were assigned one color to wear. The seal contains yellow, blue, white, red and black. Then Mrs. Shimkus made a circle on the gym floor in inside of it she placed small pieces of paper with those 5 colors on them so the children would know where to stand. It was then hoped that all the colors would turn that mass of students and teachers into a Luther Rose.
The photograph had to be taken from above to make it work and that was the main issue. At first it was thought bringing the seminary drone over would do the trick but it turns out drones need to be in a GPS area to be able to move up, down, side to side, and it is not available indoors, only outside. Then we learned that Holy Cross actually owns a lift! I mean, seriously? So many of us at the seminary wish we had a lilt because there are many times we really need to get up higher and safer than with a ladder. Anyway, George brought in the lift, one of our sem students got aboard with the church's lift driver and it worked great. Here's a look at how it went.
If you click the pictures they enlarge and you can see the faces really well.
Seminary students Aaron and Mark
Mrs. Shimkus showing the students the seal and explaining what each color meant. to begin all the students were on the bleachers.
These are just a few of the classes waiting to get going.
Pastor Wright participated as well and even wore his Luther Seal socks with Luther's famous words, "Here I stand".
Esther Comfort Dog was part of the picture and she was with her handlers and staff.
Then it was time to get going. The kids were placed on their colored marks and the lift rolled up.
And rose higher and higher
The school audience was amazed
And here we go
Everybody wave!
At the end sem student Mark noticed a few balls which had gotten caught in the ceiling rafters and he began tossing them down to the kids.
Fun way to end an event which worked out better than we hoped. Very cool morning.
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"After years of pressure from animal rights groups, Washington University has stopped using cats to train new doctors how to insert breathing tubes.
The medical school was the last in the country known to use live animals for the training, according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a nonprofit that opposes animal research."
I never would have expected Wash U, to have been using animals in this day and age of animal rights activism in their medical training.
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