I've decided that every Monday after school I'll set aside an hour for my old eighth graders (presently ninth graders) to come in and have a chat if they want. Kind of like office hours, I suppose. Today was the first day of it and it went pretty well. They all have their own private little agendas for the class, things they really want to talk about, vocabulary, the detritus of being fourteen.
Today, the guys rushed in early and wanted to talk sports. One of them spent a while telling me about an Englishman married to a cousin who came in for the weekend and bet with him on the weekend's soccer matches. Apparently there are booking rules in Bulgaria. The last thing I think I understood was that you have to place at least 3 bets if you want to place one. This makes a certain amount of sense for bookies, but also seems to demand that bettors spread their wealth a little and put some money on a safe bet. Throwing a few on Arsenal any given weekend would probably be a good way to make up some money if Middlesborough boffs it. I don't bet--it wouldn't add any more fun to the games for me, and frankly, betting on soccer is just plain confusing--but it's fun to analyze the strategy going on there.
After warping their fragile little minds by listening to them lecture me about gambling in Bulgaria, I temporarily appeased some of the other kids by going over stuff from their science classes. They're in to learning the technical side of the language, I guess, and good for them. Today was a bit of mechanical physics. Fulcrums and levers and stuff.
Then it kind of ended all of a sudden when they all had practices to run off to. Some went to soccer, some to judo, and another to tennis. Good kids, all of them. It's fun to hang out with them again.
Posted by Rob at October 4, 2004 03:52 PM