Teaching Adventures: End of the season

Monday, April 7, 2014

End of the season

Another successful sports season is over. Last night around 11 pm we returned from an amazing trip to Amman, Jordan with the Track and Field team, as well as my fellow coaches Alex and Andrew. The track season has gone by really quickly and in the last two weekends we had our final meets. On the 29th, we hosted our last meet, in which we had five teams competing, and our boys took first and our girls took second place. This was the final meet for about half of the team because they were not traveling with us to Amman.

We left Friday morning from school at 5:30 am, with our flight leaving around 7:30. It was my first time traveling for an overnight trip with students, let alone taking students out of the country. I was so pleasantly surprised at how well behaved these 18 middle and high school students were on this entire trip. It was fun helping the students fill out their forms to leave the country, and teach them how to handle getting tickets and other airport essentials, since I am sure their parents always handle these things when traveling. I know my mom and dad always handled all of this, and I am not sure I would have been responsible enough to do this myself at 12 years old. Anyways, we set off to Amman, and we took up a great majority of the plane. It was fun to see the students interacting with other students that they do not always hang out with and how well they all got along. We landed in Jordan and made our way to our hotel. We set out to find lunch, but Friday is a weekend day in Jordan, and not a lot of places were open at noon when we were looking for food, so we had to settle for the authentic Jordanian cuisine of Little Caesars, which I can not remember the last time I had that to eat. We headed off to ABS Amman, the school the meet was at, and had some time to hang out and take some team photos. The competition got started a little late, it was not organized all that well. We started around three and got done there around 7 pm. We jumped back on the bus and went to one of the malls to eat dinner at the Food Court. The kids, and more importantly, the coaches were all exhausted by 8:30 and we headed back to the hotel for an early night, since we had all been up since four am. The next day was a long day at the track, starting off at 8 am and leaving the track at 8 pm. It was a beautiful day in the sun, again, a few hitches in the organization of the meet-including a not needed 4 hour lunch break-but our athletes did really well.
Amman itself, was not much of a city that we got to see. I definitely like Beirut better than the parts of Amman I saw. The people were friendly and the malls were nice, but it didn't seem to have much of a personality.
Our under 14 and under 16 boys took first place and overall our athletes took 61 medals home with us. Some of the athletes even took 8 medals home individually.
Perhaps the most fun part of the weekend was Sunday when we were able to go to the Dead Sea Spa. We had all day to hang out around the pool and float in the Dead Sea. Oh, and the best part, go down the water slide, which I failed miserably at, slowing down so much, however Ryan also did when he went down, so I didn't feel so bad. We were able to relax after the long weekend, and just hang out, which was really nice. We headed home, and landed around 10 pm, and were back to school to a warm welcoming of excited parents waiting to take home their champion athletes. It was truly a wonderful weekend.
This coming week Ryan finishes up the basketball season, and I start up the After School Volleyball for 3rd, 4th and 5th grade volleyball camps. We had our third quarter parent teacher conferences on Thursday and this last quarter is flying by already. We have less than a month till our Week Without Walls trip to Nepal with 60 some Grade 10 and 11 students. We only have a week and a half until Spring Break, where we will be off to Brussels and Paris to see Christi, Kevin, Marshall and John.