Sub-sistence

This post was written last Tuesday, before the last post, but the sentiments still apply of course.  There was a video too, but unfortunately I did not get permission to post it here.  However, once it is officially posted at the church website I will be allowed to post that link.  Technically, the video is viewable now online via the site it’s hosted on, but since the link isn’t public yet it’s still being treated as private.  So, to the post:

Well, this last weekend was it. Maybe it was the way we went back to permanent small groups so I had the same kids each week, or maybe it was putting together the video, the first time I have ever made a video like this for 4th/5th grade, but I don’t recall feeling this way about any other group of 5th-graders leaving. Maybe it was both. It’s not as if I haven’t gotten close to the students before, I have. There is even a select group who I shared a cabin with for two summers a couple years back. Maybe my memory is just faulty. I don’t know. So two weeks from now we’ll be introducing an entire new group of kids into 4th grade as we move this last year’s 4th grade up to 5th. Due to the way things are done in the kid’s ministry with 4th and 5th grades going to service with their parents the last weekend of every month, the 3rd-graders actually have one more week before they come to us as 4th-graders. This weekend was also the swan song for this year’s drama for the K-3rd grade kids. This would ordinarily have been my week, but I had switched with someone who couldn’t do his week last weekend. Ironically, I received a call on Friday night that the one playing the guest role for the weekend couldn’t make Saturday night, so could I fill in for him? I did, which rather made things strange. I was performing with my cast, but not in my normal role. I did wear a false mustache and Fedora (can you guess the role type it was from the headwear? ) so I would at least look less like me in my other role playing a different role.  Hmm, could that last sentence of mine be more confusing?  At least you now share something with undoubtedly some of the kids who watched. . If you haven’t yet figured out the guest role this weekend, I’ll have to pull out my whip and… do something with it.  So anyway, as it turned out the original actor couldn’t make Sunday either, but the director filled in that day so I could at least spend an entire service with the very last 5th grade group at the 11:15 service.  Yes, I do miss them.

The last day or so has been a bit busy.  Part of it was me wasting time on Hamsterball, a clone of the 80’s hit arcade game Marble Madness, and part was preparations for church this weekend.  I have been wasting a lot of time on Hamsterball.  Those who remember Marble Madness will remember that the game uses a trackball.  The player would madly roll that trackball to guide his or her marble downhill (in one case uphill!) to the exit, encountering many an obstacle on the way down.  Two players could even play at the same time, adding to the madness.  Hamsterball plays a great tribute to this game, but it looks like the two player game is limited to either a one-on-one battle to knock the other off a platform, or playing just one board at a time instead of an entire tournament.  Actually, the battle part can be up to four players- one-on-one-on-one-on-one, as it were.  Instead of a marble, the wonder of current technology allowed the programmers to turn it into a hamster ball, with the hamster dutifully running in the ball as it moves.  You can play in resolutions of 640×480 up to 1280×1024, in a window or fullscreen.  Unfortunately, fullscreen for me means the game is stretched to fill my widescreen display making the ball look flat.  When windowed, the game displays a correct aspect ratio fortunately.  In lieu of a trackball, I have tried to play this game using a mouse, the track-pad on this oversized laptop, and an analog Saitek game controller.  The game controller works the best for my purposes, but I still would like to get an arcade-style trackball at some point.  I missed out on buying one for $50 back when I could afford one.  The game itself starts with ideas from Marble Madness and takes off from there.  Besides the classic enemies like an enemy ball and disappearing floors, you will encounter fans, saws, giant hammers and mousetraps, and much more.  Remember the world on Marble Madness where your marble goes up ramps instead of down?  Well, add sideways to this game in a world where the gravity changes depending on where your ball is on the screen.  Here are some pictures from the game (click for larger size).  You can also find a bunch of videos on Youtube:

The business with church involved the 4th/5th grade ministry and children’s drama.  I had a script to finish memorizing for the rehearsal which started at 3:30.  In addition, for the review game, Jeopardy, for 4th/5th grade I made some cards to draw for the categories and point values.  Sure, we could have let the students pick for themselves, but when there are 30-50 kids in the room, with half of them (two teams) having to agree that would have caused the game to drag.  One of the pastors used a die to decide in the past, but where’s the fun in that when we could have the kids draw from a box cool-looking cards instead?  On top of that it was rewards weekend.  As such I had to call about ten kids in my small groups to remind them to bring their reward sheets with them.  Most of them did, but a couple still forgot or couldn’t find them.

An odd thing happened this weekend.  There was a guest pastor from California, and for some reason on Saturday night he thought the service was two hours (it’s really 1½ hours) and so we were wondering in kids ministry what was going on when 6:45 rolled around, then 6:50 and the parents still weren’t there to pick up the kids.  I learned the next day of what happened.  The pastor was corrected and had to shorten his message by a half-hour otherwise chaos would have ensued between the two morning services as people for the second service arrived to a full parking lot because the first service hadn’t left yet . In the end, everything worked out well.  The review game was only its usual chaos, the drama went well- if not always perfect- for the three services, and the kids were too fully engaged in the room games Saturday night to care that their parents hadn’t arrived yet (I do feel for the other classrooms though that didn’t have carpetball, four-square, and air hockey).

Well this weekend was a special one, for more than one reason.  First my friends from Ohio came out and visited.  Thbey came out to see their family and then came over here for the “nightcap” before they headed back.  It took us a bit to decide on where to go for entertainment.  For a very populated area I couldn’t think of much in that line.  There is a lot of outdoor entertainment during the warmer months, but it was cold and wet so that was out.  Indoor water park down the street?  Too expensive.  Laser tag?  Kids not old enough.  So we settled on Chuck E. Cheese.  We got there and it was so packed that people were making their own parking spots at the side of the building.  Fortunately some people were leaving so we got a spot.  Inside, C bought a bunch of tokens which the older girls used for the most part.  A couple of times C would raid the cup of tokens, but the two girls used most of them.  There were a couple of rides, some skill games, a video roller coaster, and video games.  The favorite seemed to be the Nickelodeon race game which basically stole borrowed heavily from Mario Kart.  The younger of the two could not reach the accelerator when she played, so her older sister did that job for her while she steered.  I didn’t get to talk to C and L much at this time, but it was quality time with their two oldest.  Following CEC, we went to a local hot dog joint, down the street from me actually, and had us some good food.  There is where we were able to talk, that is between young C spitting up and some issues that crept up with the girls eating.  From there they dropped me off (we all went in one vehicle), changed the baby, and they were off for home and I was off to part 2 of this post…

…Drama.  This was my cast’s weekend to perform so I had to be at my church at 3:30 for rehearsal.  Between making a DVD for another friend in OH and the visit this mornig I had no time to shower so I dragged my grubby self over to the church.  We found out that the learning center where we perform was in use so we rehearsed in the room next door.  I gave the two giggling kids some candy (4th and 6th grade) and we were slowly able to get through the lines.  We then did it with blocking a few times.  Through all this time the guest author (there is a different “guest author” every week) never showed up.  Steve, the children’s pastor, didn’t know anything about it so I gave the director a call and he was surprised that he hadn’t shown up.  I hung up and a few minutes later Steve got a call from him and it turns out he wouldn’t be coming, so Steve would have to fill in (again…) for the night.  The one who was supposed to be there would be there for the Sunday performances.  Now, because Steve is the kids’ pastor he had many other duties to do so we still didn’t get to rehearse with him.  This may or may not have contributed to what happened next during the performance.  Bear in mind that I am an experienced actor and rehearsal had actually gone fairly well, especially line-wise by the time we got to the performance.  I did my puppet part well, but when I walked out to do my live character, I started off fine but then I forgot my lines!  How…?  Anyway, I at least stayed in character and the others tried to cover until I was able to recover a few lines later.  I almost missed my puppet entrance after that because I was mad at myself.

Today’s performances went fine though I am happy to say.  There was a line flub by the kids in the first performance today, but mothing like my flub last night.  I will miss this drama for the next two months.  We will be off for the holidays.  Next week is the last one until January, but it is a different cast so I am done until that time.  Hey, more time to memorize for the next one, right?

Construction- gotta love it.  Construction on the roads, construction of buildings, and so on.  Just yesteday when I went to vote- nice short lines by the way, a far cry from the two-hour wait I expected- one of the volunteers there noticed where I live and mentioned she lives down the street in a two-story house.  Of course I was thinking, “This is a ranch neighborhood, except for…”  Then she completed my thought by adding that they had just added a second story.  Construction.  Just a few years ago it seemed like every fifth house was being made into a McMansion, a topic proudly taken on and condemned by the King of the HIll crew just last weekend by the way.  If there can be one good thing said about this economic downturn it means less of these teardowns.

Today I can add construction in classrooms to the list of construction to deal with.  I subbed in music today and the music room was under construction, so I had to hold class elsewhere.  The other music/drama teacher gave up her space to me and decided to hold her classes in the regular classrooms so it didn’t bother me.  We didn’t do much.  It was a last-minute illness so the teacher just set me up with videos for lesson plans.  For the morning she left two alternatives- a Beethoven movie titled “Beethoven Lives Upstairs” and a movie titled “Bach to Rock.”  Well, Beethoven wasn’t in the building let alone upstairs, so we watched the other one.  Ironically when I went to the library after work the Beethoven movie was on the rack with recently returned movies.

There was one more class before noon where I read a book to the kids and then in the afternoon I travelled to another school.  Fortunately the road construction that had been going on a couple of weeks before in front of that school was finished.  I had stupidly left the lesson plans at the other school so I upset the secretary at the afternoon school by having the morning school fax it over.  Apparently the fax machine was in a room where only the secretary could retrieve it and she was very busy.  That drama over, the afternoon classes were, well, drama so naturally we watched sing-a-long videos.

Well, that was my day today.  Monday as I previously mentioned was 8th grade math.  No teaching, just worksheets.  And a practice ISAT extended response problem for the Algebra classes.  The only interesting thing to write about was homeroom at the end of the day.  I may have blogged about a boy recently from Italy a couple of weeks ago when I did ELL.  Well, that boy was in my homeroom.  Actually, the homerooms in this district have two teachers and here is where it gets interesting.  The other teacher is the Italian teacher.  That’s right, this school has an Italian class.  I subbed for her last year incidentally.  I wonder why they chose to put this boy in this particular homeroom…

With a new school year comes not just employment but things going on at my church as well.  Okay, I haven’t been that busy, but compared to just a week ago it seems like it.  Also, I have been catching up on my internet reading since I was down for much of last week.  It still goes down daily, but they tell me I have a perfect connection and it must be the work they’re doing in the area.  I can only hope it goes away after awhile proving them right, otherwise I’ll be stuck since they’ll never find anything with my “perfect” connection.

Monday I took a half-day job, but when I got there I found out the secretary put a teacher’s request in for the wrong day.  They then proceeded to remove the assignment from my job list so I can only hope I’ll get some sort of compensation for it, but if not I least I can have the satisfaction of working only four periods today and getting a full day’s pay for it (the norm for middle school is six periods).  The teacher came in to work and decided he was too ill to work so I picked up the late assignment.  I did not work first period as a result.  Then I found out the teacher only has five periods, helping out in the office a 6th period.  That is not normal and they didn’t have me do it, though I did ask about it.  To top it off, the teacher has a student teacher so he did most of the work.  Cool.

Yesterday was an easy day too, though when I got there I was a little concerned as the teacher didn’t leave any lesson plans.  Fortunately I only had to teach one class.  The rest were either co-teach classes (you know what that means- the other teacher does the teaching an I help as an assistant) or resource/study hall.  As it turned out the one class they were just working out of a packet, so I just taught the next page of the packet and had them start their homework in class.  Of course when I got home I found an email outlining the plans- apparently the system allows for a teacher to upload the plans to the sub-system and have them emailed to the sub.  Having never had this happen before, I never realized it could do this so I never bothered to check my email before heading to work.  Fortunately for me I had pretty much followed the plans without realizing it! Whew…

Besides work I had my usual small group Monday night and tonight I had rehearsals for both children’s drama, which starts up again this weekend, and choir.  Since they overlapped, I had to miss a little bit of each.  I just wish it hadn’t been the first rehearsal as that is one that people shouldn’t miss, even in part.  Well, that’s how it goes I guess.  I have two more choir rehearsals next week and will have to miss small group as a result but they understand about that- it only happens a few times a year.  I’ll just have to make sure they are set on song lyrics as that’s kind of my job- I usually set up a couple of powerpoints and bring my computer in.  That’s one of the nice things about this new computer.  I guess I will just have to print something up and drop them off- I’ll be in the same building after all.  Someone else provides the music by the way in case you’re wondering.  My small group starts off each week with a couple of worship songs.

Well, that’s it for now.  Time to get ready for some sleep.  It’s going to be another early day tomorrow.

No, not that kind of meeting.  I mean meeting three students from my church.  I should add that none of them were in my class but rather I sort of just ran into them.  Two of them approached me, and for the other I recognized his name and approached him.  It started with graduatin rehearsal the other day.  They were going through the names and I heard his.  I recognized it immediately.  After all, I was his AWANA leader one year in addition to the 4th/5th grade ministry.  Okay, that doesn’t entirely mean anything as I didn’t remember another such student right away who is one year younger than him and helps out in the ministry.  Anyway, once I heard it I looked out for him and he was sitting in one of my (well, the teacher I was subbing for anyway) rows.  I talked to him a little.  I asked about his sister too who is two years younger.  Now, sad to say I don’t remember a lot of the girls but his sister… let’s just say I had a reason to remember her.  Something she will grow out of if she hasn’t already.

The next meeting was the next day when I subbed for a librarian, who also helped out in the computer lab.  There were four classes to come in that day, pared down to three when one of the teachers canceled.  I sorted books when I wasn’t helping students at the computers.  Now aren’t you glad I didn’t actually write about this assignment yesterday?  The three of you who still read this blog would have gone down to zero!    So, in the afternoon a third grader asked me if I played the doctor in the drama at church.  Of course I told her I did, and not only that, but I would see her in fourth grade this weekend, even though she will still be in third grade for another week at school.

Finally, just today I ran into yet another one.  She was in one of the four fifth grade classes I was not subbing in (five total at that school! ).  She saw me in the hall and asked if I worked in 4th/5th grade at my church.  When I said yes, I of course told her I wouldn’t be seeing her there this weekend since she is no longer a fifth grader there, but a part of the junior high ministry.  She was a little disappointed in this- I know I would, knowing I would have to attend regular worship from then on!  True, now I willingly go and enjoy the service but I know at age eleven I wouldn’t and didn’t when I served as an acolyte once in awhile at the church I grew up in.  And that was only an hour-long service.  At my church now the service is half again as long.

Three students in three days- who would have guessed?  Of course this doesn’t beat the three students in one day a month ago, but still.  As for my day today, as I said it was fifth grade.  I corrected work with them, watched over their work on some projects in the morning, did some teaching in the afternoon, etc.  The principal and I watched a few students play Rock Band in music.  They were pretty good.  Then he came and watched me teach science.  About a topic I knew little about (cold/warm fronts, high/low pressure zones).  Sigh.  I hope he wasn’t too disappointed, but then I’m sure he understands a sub will not necessarily be an expert in anything taught during the day.  The students were pretty good.  A few had their minds on other things during silent reading, but hey, summer’s almost here.

…for the 5th graders in children’s ministry that is.  What?  Did you think I meant I was done with this blog?  Today the 5th graders made their exit from children’s ministry.  In a couple of weeks they will officially enter student ministries as junior high students.  Being Memorial Day weekend didn’t help though as there were a few who didn’t make it due to traveling, though fortunately not too many.  The Junior high pastor (I think? I don’t remember the other one leaving) came in with a couple other leaders and spoke with them about the welcome night, things to expect in junior high, etc.  The kids were prayed over and given certificates- a sort of graduation I guess.  Of course, some won’t really be in junior high/middle school if they go to a public school in the area where 6th grade is still elementary, but at the church 6th grade is junior high even for them.

So, kids I have been working with for the last two years are now gone and in two weeks the third grade moves up to take their place.  They should recognize me though, at least Saturday night kids, as I have been in the kid’s drama.  This is supposed to be the time then to heavily advertise camp, but the early bird discount will be over by then as camp is one short month away, and unless things change significantly, yours truly will be joining them for the week.  I have said before that that one week last year was very powerful for me spiritually, and I hope it will be the same for me this year- and for whoever will be in my cabin this time around.

Going back to drama, the headline applies here as well.  It is done for the season, not to start again until next fall with a new theme.  My usual exit line, to tell the audience to be sure to tune in next week, reflected this as well, instead telling them to be sure to trust Jesus since He’s the only one who can make us super human.  I also added a line for the third graders- that they would see me (“someone who looks like me”) in two weeks.  Heh, heh…  So at the end, we added cast bows, and on reflection, I should have walked over to the puppet as well, since the puppeteer couldn’t very well step out and take a bow too.  Oh, well.