Tag Archives: football

Time – Weekly Photo Challenge

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Saturday was a beautiful sunny day, cold, but it is February, after all. This morning was gray and cloudy and for February, relatively warm – 37 degrees F or 3 degrees C. Warm for February. But, it’s all relative. I didn’t get to spend much time outside yesterday. I spent the day catching up on grading – grading Civil War tests – timelines and essays. And it’s not likely I’ll get much time today, either.

essays - what is central idea of the Gettysburg Address - they don't grade themselves
essays – what is central idea of the Gettysburg Address – they don’t grade themselves

I had promised time to B, my wife, but grading the tests took longer than I expected. I went to school to grade – the tests needed to be scanned and the only scanner I can use is at school. I was sort of married to school. The school was open Saturday, the local youth athletic league had rented the gym for the basketball season and yesterday was picture day.

I donned my lanyard with my school ID and keys and ambled in. I found the library open – a bonus of sorts. The library is being transformed to a modern library use – space to sit and read, use laptops, and other devices and maintenance workers were in on the weekend finishing work on a charging station and a printing station they had started the day before. The library still has books, but times are changing and our school will be issuing all students a Google Chrome laptop for use next fall and the librarian is trying to get ahead of the curve. We, meaning teachers, are, too. Continue reading Time – Weekly Photo Challenge →

Half and half

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There is another half of summer yet come, waiting. Or, summer is more than half-complete, finished; depending on your perspective. According to my summer calendar, 29 days remain. For O she has 31 days, W has 22, and B has 31 days left of summer. It’s cruel how fast summer moves.

halfandhalf
the team gathers for the final time this summer, as a storm clouds gather on the horizon

The past several days our weather has been interesting. Monday it was warm and muggy.  Tuesday the weather changed and it was cool enough to open windows and rely on nature to cool the house, and Wednesday evening was cool and getting out of the pool after my swim was a chilly experience. Thursday was overcast and rainy, and then Friday arrived. Friday arrived with excessive heat warnings and afternoon thunderstorms. O and I tried to make it to the pool, but the lightning and thunder closed the pool. Instead, we watched nature’s light show and decided to try again Saturday. Continue reading Half and half →

Off-Season

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“It’s not the will to win that matters—everyone has that. It’s the will to prepare to win that matters.” Paul “Bear” Bryant

The first game in 2015 high school football season is 75 days away. The first official practice is a 56 days away. School is out for the summer and summer football camp started last Wednesday. The 2015 Tiger football team began preparing, for W it will (likely) be his last football season as a player. He has learned a lot and grown a lot as an athlete and as a person. Being part of a team has helped hone his sense of responsibility and preparation as well as his sense of service. He is a team player – that’s what it takes for a team to be successful – players willing to put the team before themselves.

NIU_tigertalk
Coach Muhitch addresses the team – the good, the bad, and the ugly – that’s why he is 103-24 with 3 state championships and 2 runners up – preparation

It’s during the off-season that the players come together and learn to work and play as a team. It’s the off-season when the coaches develop players and teach. There is a lot that will happen between now and the first game – a lot of growing – mentally and physically.

Continue reading Off-Season →

Not my problem

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It’s Super Bowl Sunday and for the last four Super Bowls, I’ve made a prediction and every year my prediction has been a fail. Epic fail. Last year’s prediction was the worst ever. So this year, I won’t predict, I won’t share which team I am rooting for, I won’t tip my hand in any way. I just want to see a good game that keeps my interest until the very end, and of course I want to see some good commercials.

Last night I went to bed and the snow was beginning to fall. The weather guys began predicting a major snowstorm on Wednesday or Thursday and the hype has been building since. When I flipped on the radio yesterday, it was all I could hear – major snowstorm, blizzard warning, yada yada yada! The grocery stores were nuts yesterday as folks were out getting bread, milk, and eggs – in case we were snowed in. This morning when I peered out the window, the trees were coated and it was lovely. The snowplow had yet to clean the street and everywhere I could see was covered with a think velvety blanket of fresh snow.

my view this morning.....
my view this morning…..

Then, the snowplow came through. Continue reading Not my problem →

Weekly Photo Challenge: Achievement

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Achievement – something that has been done or achieved through effort; a result of hard work (Merriam and Webster)

Last weekend our high school football season ended. The Tigers were one of eight teams left in their class – one of sixty-four left. When the siren sounded last Saturday afternoon, there were sixteen teams still standing – two teams for each of Illinois’ eight classes from 1A to 8A. The Tigers have been there before and it was the team goal at the beginning of the year. It’s the goal every year. It’s the ultimate Achievement.

High school football season. It was a long season and long journey. It began the day after school let out in June with summer practices and weekend summer 7 on 7 tournaments. There was a three-week break between summer workouts and the beginning of August practices. The break was long enough for W to break away to the cottage and a squeeze in a 50-mile canoe trip to the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota.

The Tigers played twelve games. They lost the first two games, won the third and then, lost the next two games to reach mid-season 1-4. In early October, the playoffs looked unreachable. However, through hard work, determination, and a little good fortune – I am not calling it luck, they won their next four games and qualified for the playoffs and were seeded 13th of 16 teams in one side of the 7A bracket. Continue reading Weekly Photo Challenge: Achievement →

Think PINK – Freedom Rock

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I have been to two funerals as a teacher. I do not want to go to another funeral again. Ever.

Both funerals I attended were in my first two years as a teacher. Actually, the first funeral was in the summer of between my first and second years of teaching. It was awful. The second was less than a year later. It was just as awful. I have not been to another funeral since though one of students lost their dad last spring. The teachers were not invited and I wanted to go, but I couldn’t; I had my own family funeral to attend to last spring.

one of my favorite teacher gifts ever. Cherished.
one of my favorite teacher gifts ever. Cherished.

At the time, there were not words in my vocabulary to express the feeling of awfulness I had when I looked into the eyes of my twelve year-old student and told him and her that I was sorry that their mother had passed away. I think I fumbled with some words like “I am so sorry for your loss.” Or maybe I said, “I have been praying for you and your family, please let me know what I can do to help you.” No matter what I said, it didn’t take away the pain of losing their mother. Or the uncertainty of what the future held for them. Those kids – Melinda and Jeremiah – are now in their twenties and out of college and have jobs like me. Occasionally, I get to visit the high school and I ran into Melinda on my way in one time, we had a nice conversation and then we parted. I had Jeremiah’s sister two years after their mom passed away and she wrote an amazing essay about how her mother’s passing was an important event in her life. I remember the essay well, it was good, thoughtful, well written; it was head and shoulders above her peer’s papers. I followed them along in high school occasionally asking high school teachers or counselors whom I knew how they were doing and then they graduated high school and I lost touch. They’re grown now, or as grown as someone is when they are in the second half of their twenties.

Fourteen years later, I still don’t believe I have the right words. Continue reading Think PINK – Freedom Rock →

The Snow, the Hype, and the Big Game

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xlviiiIt’s Super Bowl Sunday. The sun is shining and it appears that we will have school Monday, for the first time since December. I think we will have to have an orientation about what to do on a Monday.

It snowed yesterday coating the yard (and everything else) with a fresh coat of white powder. It is beautiful. I looked back in time and last year we hardly had any snow, less than 5 inches had fallen for the 2012-13 season. So far, we have 52 inches and the forecast calls for snow Tuesday and again, Saturday. I think it has all fallen here. I was talking to another teacher after school Friday and we both got to laughing about a joke letter that we had seen years ago. My mother in law sent it to me when we bought the house and I had to learn to shovel snow. I don’t remember how much snow fell that winter, but I do remember feeling a love-hate relationship with snow when March rolled around. I have since lost the original, it was grainy from being copied repeatedly, but thanks to the internet most things worthwhile (appropriate and inappropriate) can be found with relative ease. Here it is, Diary of a Snow Shoveler.

My Super Bowl predictions haven’t been so super and I have losing streak running back to 2009 Continue reading The Snow, the Hype, and the Big Game →

Scarcity

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the last one, shiver me timbers - it was 15 degrees outside!
the last one, shiver me timbers – it was 15 degrees outside!

This week or rather the last week has been a whirlwind. The time since Thanksgiving whisked by and disappeared. Last weekend we had guests join us from out of town for the weekend and it was time well spent. They came for a youth hockey tournament and we had dinner together Friday and Saturday nights. It was good to connect with them. We see them at the cottage where our children are friends and they play together in the lake and on the slopes, depending on the season. Ironically, Paul was our pilot when we returned from Spring Break 2013 and we spent the night at their home celebrating a Swedish Easter Eve, before driving home on Easter Sunday. While we ate dinner and talked the kids played games in the family room. It really was time well spent.

Nevertheless, as usual, I digress. The lateness of this year’s Thanksgiving holiday means there are fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Last year there were twenty days, but this year there are fifteen. And, the kids know it, the teachers do too. There is always a frenzy in school, as we get ready for Winter Break and then end of the quarter, which comes the week after winter break. Just like the print on the passenger side mirror, OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR.

IMG_2095
Sunday morning’s sunrise welcomes me to the morning..

At school we’ve been reading, writing, thinking, and learning. ELA, or English Language Arts, has me bogged down. We’ve been doing a lot of writing and I am overloaded in grading. I am looking forward to the break in hopes that I might get some down time to grade and plan. In geography we’ve been studying human geography and we were finishing the unit last week. We’d come to a concept that students consistently struggle with – issues related to population growth, specifically, scarcity and carrying capacity.   Continue reading Scarcity →

It ain’t over ‘til it’s over, and the gun goes off

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'77' is for Red Grange a Wheaton alum and NFL Hall of Famer
’77’ is for Red Grange a Wheaton alum and NFL Hall of Famer

The Tigers lost their playoff game Friday night and their season is over. I am sad. My son played his last game a couple of weeks ago when the regular season ended and is now waiting for wrestling season to begin this coming Monday. It will keep him busy and fully exercised during those lean months of little sunshine and bitter cold. It’ll give me and B something to do on Friday evening and Saturday. He wrestled last year and had a good freshman season.

If you have been following MtDC over the past several years or high school football seasons or however you want to count it, you know I am a passionate high school football fan – especially the Wheaton Warrenville South Tigers. Even before W got into high school, we were there on Friday nights. It was our Friday evening entertainment. B grew up in a small town in southwestern Ohio where her Tigers were legendary in the small school section of Ohio high school football in the mid to late 1990s and early 2000s. She played in the marching band in high school and marched Friday night in the late seventies before graduating and going off to college. Her dad played for the high school team in the forties and later at Miami University after his navy service at the end of WWII. When W was a little kid we went to watch my nephew play for the Ohio State Football Championship in Paul Brown Stadium in Massillon, Ohio. They won 26-0 and it was a good game, and it was worth every minute of the four-hour drive there and the four-hour dive home.

I guess that’s why I am so agitated this morning and was even more agitated last night. The Tigers began the season rated in the top twenty and knocked off the defending 7A state champion in the first game. In the second game, they defeated another state power. In the third game, the Tigers were up against the crosstown rival Wheaton North. In a hard fought game, the Tigers dominated the Falcons in every way. The Tigers had a bump in the road mid-season and lost a game to a team they should have defeated and were soundly defeated in the second to the last game of the year to last year’s 8A state championship runner up and possibly this year’s 8A state champion. Who knows? Regardless the Tigers finished 7-2 and qualified for the playoffs. They won last weekend and moved on to the second round.

The Tigers have been successful, very successful in the nineties and ever since. Continue reading It ain’t over ‘til it’s over, and the gun goes off →

After Midnight

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It is another Sunday morning and the sun is up, the air is cool and crisp, and leaves litter the front lawn. I slept late this morning, or at least later than I should have although I have reasonable excuse – I stayed up too late last night, past eleven – almost to midnight.

I remember (often) the days of my youth when after midnight was truly after midnight, well after midnight. Eric Clapton’s song says it all about what I was doing:

After midnight, we’re gonna let it all hang down.
After midnight, we’re gonna chug-a-lug and shout.
We’re gonna stimulate some action;
We’re gonna get some satisfaction.
We’re gonna find out what it is all about.
After midnight, we’re gonna let it all hang down.
Eric Clapton – “After Midnight”

These days, I can’t hang much after ten, maybe it’s because I have aged or I have gotten wiser, or just that I realize that have to get moving and accomplish something before noon.    Continue reading After Midnight →