killer forehand

The tennis team got stomped. Too bad our season is over, we'd fare well against Evansville teams after facing Columbus and Highland.

Halloween Dance

So far, the Halloween Dance looks like it should be fun, but we're having trouble finding a DJ.
We've already booked it at the C.K. Newsome Center for Friday 24th.

Looked at the "Kiss the Pig" contest. Mr. Phipps is going down.

my patchwork experience

I liked it. My kid, Carrington, said he had already finished his homework. I remember lying that lie all the time when I was younger, so I don't know if he truly had finished his homework or if he just wanted to move on to games. But it's not like he then said "c'mon lets go play video games." Instead, we read "Ten Apples Up On Top" by Dr. Suess. In that book, a dog, lion, tiger, and several bears balance apples on their head. I tried to get Carrington into balancing pencils on his hand, and then spinning the pencil, a la policy debaters, but he didn't really catch on. Which was cool, cause we started talking about baseball. This kid will go on to great things in baseball. He's already part of an interstate all-star team.

After chatting about baseball for a while, we played Subtraction Bingo. But because the game doesn't involve complex subtraction (is there such a thing) the game is all luck. And Carrington had some unbelieveable luck. He beat me TEN times. We tied twice. I never won. I don't think he stacked the deck...

I'm looking forward to next week.

Patch Work

Wow. I just got finished with my tutoring at Patch Work.

I got there, and i had to fill out this form, asking me if I have ever done drugs, been in jail, etc.
After that, they placed me with this totally awesome third grader, who was so excited about school it made me wonder. Then I got to watch Andy Goldman get her butt kicked in Checkers Multiplication by a 5th grader. The funny thing is, she was really trying.

Can't wait to go back next week.

race for the cure 2003

You can read my personal review here.

Day School won the KISS contest for highest participation rate again.

Next year Key Club or SAC or somebody should go there with bags to collects cans for recycling. There are several thousand cans there.

My speech departments' regular meetings

My apologies for all my random meetings so far. But here's the regular schedule for me now:

LD- Mondays
OO- Thursdays

Both of those meetings will be afterschool on the 4th floor. Monday's I may be in an officers' meeting for a few minutes, so bear with me. Thursdays for OO I may have Key Club for a few minutes afterschool. In that case, Ms. Helfrich is perfectly qualified to talk with you about OO, so chat down there. I can drive people home if they need a ride on those days. If you only do one event, you are welcome to stay for the other event's day if you want to wait til I am done with the primary event for that day. Oh, and I may hold a few small meetings during lunch for the focused LD/OOers.

hey look! New poster here!

Margaret Musgrave, freshman extraordinaire has posted on the Signature Monitor! (see her first post below) Remember, I'll give just about anyone who wants an account on SM a chance. Just drop me a line!

Margaret is a cool freshman. But Margaret, note the diff between the "Post" and "Post & Publish" buttons.

Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama will be in Bloomingotn this weekend! Remember that we leave at 5:45 AM on Sunday morning in the Civic Center parking lot.

NATIONAL MERIT SEMIFINALISTS!

Signature "unofficially" has 5 National Merit Semifinalists. These 5 will continue on to compete for finalist status (about 90% of NM semifinalists break to finals). Not to "tout," but 5 NM semifinalists is a huge achievement for a class of around 45 students. Hopefully all of the semifinalists can go on to win the National Merit Scholarship, and this will be the first year in many for Signature producing National Merit winners.

I heard the semi-finalist cutoff for Indiana was 211.

Cross Country

Today was the Gibson Southern Cross Country Invitational. Runners for Sig were Pat Blandford, Will Schmidt, Cheise, Jimmy, Whitney Peters, Grace Fox, Emma, and me. Will was the only one to place (23rd out of all the sophomore boys). My personal placing was not great--48/50 senior boys. But at a time of 21:30 for 2.75 miles, that's roughly 7:48 minutes per mile!

The highlight of the day was receiving our minimalist uniforms. Minimalist.

black students' achievement in the EVSC

The EVSC has been asked to sit down with the NAACP about the achievement disparity between black and white students.

In my 1-10th grade experience in the EVSC system, I never noticed any extraordinary achievement gap based on racism, overt or hidden. I think the disparity is a result of the demographics of Evansville...many blacks are from low-income families, which obviously distracts students from their academics.

At the same time, a program to break lower-income families of all races out of that cycle of poverty is needed. Regardless of one's thoughts on the NAACP's calling out of the EVSC, we can all hope that this meeting will lead to greater academic achievement for the EVSC.