Passover and Colorado Academy

Passover

Shaine, the Intern coordinator for the Education Department, decided to host a Seder for all the Jewish people at Crow Canyon. Ironically this mainly consisted of the temporary employees (namely myself, Tayla - the four monther, and Ronnie, Josie the eight monther's husband). Shaine and Sidney (one of the IT guys) are the only other Jews here. The Seder was very untraditional, but was quite good. We picked and chose what we wanted to read from the Haggadah and then ate (turkey and numerous non-yeasty fixings). It was the best meal I had all Passover long (there's not much in the Crow Canyon kitchen that doesn't contain yeast, flour, wheat, or something else of that nature).



Colorado Academy

I finally got to work with my mentor at Crow Canyon, Becky. She wanted to wait until I'd been here a while so that I could teach all of her classes and she could sit back in the back of the class and cause problems. We ended up splitting the teaching, but I took the lead for a few of the modules.

Our kids this week hailed from Colorado Academy in Denver, Colorado. There were 64 fifth grades that came and were thus broken up into three different groups. Becky and I worked with the Green group.

A nice changed to the generally monotonous schedule, was that this group requests to go to Hovenweep National Monument ever year. So Tuesday morning we set out for these amazing Pueblo III ruins. The nice thing about the ruins at Hovenweep is that they are still standing so the amateur archaeologist doesn't need to completely rely on their imagination to decipher where the buildings once stood.







The trip to Mesa Verde this week was quite chaotic. We got a late start due to picture taking of the tykes right when we were suppose to be heading out. Due to the fact that all 64 kids, 6 chaperones, and 3 educators (one short) were headed to the Park on the same day, we needed to take two large buses. The kids were broken up into their bus groups, which did not correspond to their education groups (red, blue, and green), therefore the educators only had about a third of the kids that they'd been working with during the beginning of the week. Since we were one educator short, I was re-shuffled and ended up working with Shaine and Becky was left to rule over 33 kids with the help of the class teacher (who was good at getting the kids to listen).
It was an interesting experience to have some many kids, a third that neither Shaine nor I had worked with for the whole week. They kids for the most part were really good. It was only on the way up to Mesa Verde that I was considering strangling some of them. The kids on my bus liked to sing all those annoying songs like '99 bottles of Beer on the Wall," and "Ol' McDonald's Farm," and weird ones that they made up. It was all fine until the bus driver reminded the kids that they never made it past 93 bottles of beer on the wall. So to prove him wrong, the kids (a few very determined ones) decided to make it all the way to 0. Just imagine switchbacks leading through a beautiful park with the soundtrack of "....take one down and pass it around...76 bottles of beer on the wall..." The chaperones and Shaine kept taking the microphone and pointing out sights of interest or random non-sensical information in an effort to distract the singers. Eventually they gave up and joined in. About the time I was ready to resort to riddles, we arrived. At lunch I gave out riddles and murder mysteries in an effort to avoid a repeat performance for the trip home. It worked in that they didn't sing, but every three seconds it was "Robby! I got it. The man was blind..." or "Robby! What's the answer...I give up" If was fun actually and it helped me to get to know some of the other kids that I hadn't worked with previously.

To make the trip even more chaotic, we were doing everything in reverse order so that the other group and us didn't overlap. That meant that we saw the cliff dwellings first (the older times periods) and the younger stiff (pithouses and roomblocks) later in the day. To go on Ruins road using takes 1 1/2 - 2 hours, but due to the bus breaking down at lunch for an hour we only had 45 minutes to accomplish this. It became..."Everyone off the bus...isn't it pretty...alright that was 30 seconds, enough looking...back on the bus."

Needless to say it was a hectic day. But in the end I think that it turned out well. The kids were great, we got to cram a lot of information into their brains, and I had a good conversation with a really bright 10 year old.