"C" students

The end of the school year brings with it an entirely new set of challenges.  Creative time management is a crucially important element in surviving the final few days of  athletic programs, award assemblies, presentations, and service projects.  On this particular half day of school, county inmates were given the day off so that my students could spend the morning laying mulch and grooming trails at Letchworth State Park.  They returned shortly before 11 am, layered in dirt and grime and sweat, full of stories of slinging snakes and dancing deer.  Their departure buses were scheduled to arrive in about a half hour.  Thirty minutes, I thought.  Plenty of time to review the subtraction of fractions with unlike denominators.  Perhaps we could conduct a scientific time-lapse simulation modeling the depletion of the earth's non-renewable resources.  At the very least, we could journal each student's individual account of their life-altering conservation experience.  As you can imagine, the children were quite eager to settle calmly into their seats and begin a regimented lesson.

What was a poor 6th grade teacher to do?  Well, to record this auspicious moment in education, we trooped our students out to the track and arranged the approximately sixty sixth graders on the bleachers  for a picture-taking session.  Eight minutes down.  One kid, who will ultimately rise to the status of valedictorian or end up embezzling stock-holders in a ponzi scheme (or both),  suggested that we spell out the letters "LCS."  Brilliant.

A minute's deliberation resulted in the consensus that sixty sitting students would make flimsy, frail letters.  It was decided that all the students would be incorporated in each "L," "C," and "S."  To foster independence, cooperation, and critical thinking skills as well as afford us time to chat while laughing at them, we encouraged our students to use their spacial intelligence to arrange themselves.  The "L" took only five minutes of debate.  The "C" and the "S" required some adult mediation.  We snapped our shots but our satisfaction fell short as the letters were difficult to distinguish from ground-level.  An aerial view would have been ideal but time was growing short.  Before I knew it, mindful of my bad knee (see 6/1/2013 Kickball: The agony of "de-feet), I was gingerly climbing a shaky ladder to the field house roof. Students were then required to embark in an impromptu geometry lesson as they had to apply their knowledge of transformations to flip their original letter shapes upside down for the next photo session.

Time was now running short.  Pictures were taken in haste and then the race to the waiting buses was on.  We enthusiastically waved good-bye to our picturesque cherubs and then hurried in to download our masterpieces as the introduction to our end-of-year slideshow.  Disaster struck.  Somehow, in our hurry, the aerial (not to be confused with the font, arial) "C" wasn't recorded.  Arguments ensued.  What should we do?  Use a wordart "C" in between our student-spelled letters?  Insert the ground-version?  Wait for a Monday re-take?  An hour of carefully calculated cropping resulted in a newly-crafted "C."  We chopped the top off the "S" and with meticulous precision, moved it atop the "L," solving our problem.  What a learning experience!  In the world of education, one must make the most of every moment.