Hello people, and welcome to this week's edition of Posts Written to Prevent Falling Asleep in Writing Class. I hope you are all having a wonderful day. I, for the most part, am doing very well. I spent a rather lazy morning doing Bible study at a coffee shop and then playing an online game with Ethan. Then I drove to school and read a couple short stories that we are discussing in writing workshop later today. And now I'm here in class, writing this post!

I'm finding myself more and more frustrated by the way a couple of my coworkers are running classes at the gym. Parents are paying a fair amount of money for these classes and it is important that we make good use of the time. This year I am working mostly with the team (which is wonderful...I'm very happy about that) but I often find myself leaving the team in the middle of something, running across the gym and fixing disasters in a class. Of course the teachers don't think there is a disaster in their class, but to a parent sitting in the bleachers it looks horrible when there are seven kids standing in a line while two teachers stand by and just watch. I feel like a broken record sometimes. Get on your knees. Get physically close to the kids. Touch, look at and speak to every child in your line. Set up self-running stations. If there are more than three kids in a line, you are doing something wrong. If they could just get those simple things then classes would be awesome. But until they figure those things out we will continue to lose students! I did a workshop for the new teachers two weeks ago and I'm planning on doing another one next week, so hopefully that will help things.

As long as we're talking about gym, I think I'll write a little more. I haven't written much about gym lately. I am working Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights and I'm working mostly with the level five to sevens. This is a blast. I've never been able to spend this much time working with the higher levels and I'm learning a ton. We have a new optionals coach this year and she's taught me quite a bit. I'm learning how to teach giants on the bar (where they swing all the way around the bar) and a little bit of twisting on vault. Additionally, the fact that the students are at the gym 3 or 4 nights a week means you get to know them a lot better, which makes everything more fun.

Saturday night I ran five miles. That is a long distance.

Last night I met with a girl from church who wants to go on a mission trip to London next year. She and her mom wanted to talk about preparing for a mission trip, so I spent about half an hour giving her my views on how missions work and showing her a few verses that stand out to me about missions. Planning for that was all very interesting...you often don't realize how much thought you've given something until you start outlining what you want to tell somebody about it.

Yesterday I taught my first lesson at my internship school. We read "Monsters are Due on Maple Street", a Twilight Zone episode. We talked about conflict and drew "conflict charts" as we read it and talked about reading strategies for reading a script. It went very well and I really enjoyed teaching it.

I have purposely not mentioned my black belt test so far. I will try not to mention it as I sign out.

Bye people!

My black belt test will be Oct 4th at 11:00 am in Jennings, OK. Those who want to come are welcome.

Here's directions.