Yesterday, the whole school went to a minor league baseball game, the Erie, PA Seawolves vs. the Norwich, CT Navigators (usually shortened to ‘Gators). Maintenance folks, teachers, students, administrators — everybody. Well.
Not everybody. This school has an unusual divide between boarding faculty and day faculty — between those who sleep on dorm and run the place after 3:00pm, and those who arrive at 8:00 am and leave at 2:45pm each day. All the day faculty who were on duty yesterday came. Most of the day faculty didn’t bother. Which meant that we were grossly under-staffed when it came to having enough chaperones. See, in theory, none of us teachers have more than 12-20 kids at a time, and usually when we have those kids, they’re closely directed: they’re in class, or on dormitory, or in sports. Yesterday, though, a lot of teachers wound up sitting in their assigned section of the ball park, watching the game. Most of our kids were wandering all over the park — watching for fly balls, buying souvenir balls, getting their picture taken with Gator, the mascot, and generally getting in the way of everyone trying to enjoy the game — all over the park.
C, a colleague of mine, said loudly to one student, “I would like to be able to come back here, proud to be a teacher at this school. Your behavior today helps to determine whether I can do that.” Too late, C. Our kids bumped into other patrons, shouted loudly, and a lot of them failed to watch the ball game — which meant they needed to be watched more closely than we were watching them. The stadium ushers were watching our guys a lot more closely than we were, and they’re carrying stories home, I imagine.
See, the irony is that if you brought your family to a ball game, and your kids were running around creating a little ruckus, most spectators wouldn’t mind much. It’s sort of expected. We brought our family to the ball park yesterday, though, and that amounted to 140 kids. With money in their pockets, and way too much energy in their legs. And you’re telling me they’re going to sit still for nine innings of a baseball game? Uh….
In other news, my coughing and continuing sickness seems to have developed into bronchitis. I started coughing yesterday at the ball game, and kept coughing, every few minutes all day, until about midnight. I started coughing again this morning around 4:45. I’m going to the doctor’s, today. I don’t think it will help much, but I’ve been sick since grandma died at the end of March, and I can’t deal with it any more.
