Gerge School

Jim's description of his school:

The day starts with 30 minutes of silent reading in the Amen convention Center, a stadium type structure where grades 1-7 sit on concrete benches and read or visit for around 20 – 30 minutes. I generally read with a young student. Sometimes they read from the new testament and once a 2nd grader struggling with the agony in the garden asked me about Peter and the boys and why they were sleeping while the Lord was talking to God. I told her they had been up for several days preparing for the walleye opener which was the following Saturday. This led to a discussion of what a walleye was and how you opened it.

Wednesday and Friday are chapel days And you can’t imagine what takes place. There is more mumbo jumbo than even a wounded veteran of 16 years of Catholic Education can decipher. Contributing to my confusion are the occasional visiting evangelist – I wish Mark Twain were here.

!st hour, scheduled for 8:30 starts somewhere around 9:00. I’m never really sure what my schedule will be until I get to school as it changes every day. The teachers don’t know until they check the daily schedule in the morning and then they often change hours with another teacher for one reason or another so the schedule is rarely accurate . The teachers change classrooms so the kids have no idea what class is next until a teacher shows up. I am currently working with Pre k 3year olds, PreK 4 year olds, K 5 year olds and 1st grade 6 &7 yr old.

I have always been taught that the amount time on task is directly related to the amount of learning that takes place, however, I’m not sure that these folks would agree. Here,for example, is what took place when we first arrived. School was in the middle of a 3 week xmas vacation,followed by a 1 week week workshop on brain mapping given by some charlatan from Indianapolis. Then we had a week of classes followed by a week of review for semester exams. This week they have exams for 3 hours each day and then the kids go home. Our services were not needed during this week so I went To Zeway for two days and taught huge classes which was a very rewarding experience. On Wednesday we had cultural awareness which sounds deadly but was quite good. This was given by A Norwegian Woman who had the same mannerism as Kris Felling. Thursday we tried to go to school but the car failed to pick us up so we played golf. More about this later and also more about our cribbage tourney.

When we actually have class I have a lot of fun. The little kids are fired up and askme each day as I arrive – will you teach us today mister. My reply is always hopeful for I have no idea. The kids hang on my shirt and pants and hair and ears as I read to them, but they seem most interested in the wrinkled skin hanging from my elbows and my ancient hands with the visible veins and strange skin. They stroke and pet my skin while I read to them and ask why my skin is the way it is. I tell them I was a blood hound in a former life which totally goes by them but makes me giggle for I think of Terry Statton.