High Plains Panhandler

Destination Imagination 2005

Suzanne has been a coach (along with a friend of ours) of Colleen’s Destination Imagination school team. Destination Imagination is program for kids all over the country (and Canada too!) that poses puzzles and challenges. The idea is for kids to get a team together and come up with interesting and creative ways of solving the challenges. Adults are supposed to help them find their way, but they’re not supposed to be heavy-handed about it. Everything in DI is up to the kids. They come up with the ideas, the stories, and the solutions. Here’s what the DI website has to say about the program: “The Destination ImagiNation® program helps kids build important, lifelong skills, such as problem solving, teamwork and divergent thinking.” It’s important to note here that DI promotes divergent thinking, compared to deviant thinking, which is what Destination My-Brother-In-Law Dan is all about.

Suzanne’s been working with Colleen’s DI team for most of the school year on this year’s challenge, which was called Radio DI. The team was supposed to make up a radio drama for a live audience. In the show they were to include a story cliffhanger, a commercial for some outlandish product, sound effects, a news bulletin, a unique character, and some examples of the team members’ special talents. You can read the full description of the challenge here.

The important part of DI is not the official day when the team presents their solution to the challenge in front of a panel of judges. It’s really what happens throughout the year in their after school meetings when the kids get together and solve other practice problems with creativity and imagination. That’s really neat. I wasn’t able to do anything like this when I was a kid. The closest I got was stuffing ball bearings in the nose of my Cub Scout Pinewood Derby car, hoping the added mass would make it go faster during races. My creative problem solving that day got me kicked out of the derby.

This year Colleen’s team was old enough to enter the competitive part of the DI competition. Megan was also on a DI team, led by a different coach, but this team was still in purely performance mode. (Teams don’t break into competitive mode until third grade.) Megan’s team’s category (Rising Stars) had the challenge of telling a fairy tale story after the normal story left off. The challenge was called “More to the Story!” and a much better description is here.

The Big Day of the competition took us to the Big City of Lubbock, which is two hours south of here. We left early Saturday morning and got into town a little before Colleen’s team was supposed to meet, go over last minute preparations, and make for the stage. Last year her team performed in a small classroom, but since that was non-competition we weren’t sure what this year would bring. Sure enough, when it was their time to perform, the took over the giant stage in the auditorium, which in itself would cause most kids to panic. The team had eight minutes, including setup, for their presentation. The one surprise in this was the obligatory New Bulletin that they were supposed to announce. The judges provided this one, randomly selected from a bucket of choices. The team was supposed to say the new bulletin exactly as it was written on the paper, then they could make up a story to go along with it. The judges were very clear: repeat it exactly as written. (Another team we watched messed this up and lost points because of it).

The judges gave the team one minute to talk about what they were going to do with the headline, and then they started. It was great. It really was. I knew just slight bits of the story (I knew there was a ghost and a blind girl), but it was great fun to see it all from the beginning, with sound effects, radio jingles, the whole bit (the story, by the way, dealt with a girl who suddenly became blind and could only see ghosts. She visits one in a graveyard to help her with her dilemma. The interesting part of this is that it’s a radio drama about a girl who can’t see. It’s an allegory and metaphor all wrapped up in one!). The team had great stage presence; the audience laughed at all the right jokes; the sound effects were great. Colleen sounded terrific on the cello (she played music to introduce and exit the different scenes).

After their performance, and after the judges asked them questions about how they came up with their idea, it was time to see Megan’s team. I had little idea of what they were going to do, so I was completely surprised when they started their fairy tale and Megan ended up being the villain (I later found out that they drew the roles from a hat). In their story, Megan gives the princess some poison that turns her into a sheep, but in the end Megan is captured and sent to jail. At the end of the play, there she was, sitting behind their toilet paper tube jail cell that they all made, grinning and grinning. I think she enjoyed being the bad guy for once.

Right while this was going on, Colleen’s team was in their super secret instant challenge room. This is where they were given 30 minutes to compete a puzzle - I think it had something to do with placing weights on a hat, but no one was allowed to touch the hat. Since the conditions of this challenge were hush hush, Colleen wouldn’t tell us what they had to do until we on the road for home later that evening.

After the challenges and performances, we got a bite to eat, and then headed back to the auditorium for the awards ceremony. We hadn’t been to the ceremony before, because last year Colleen’s team was non-competitive, so we didn’t know what to expect. Even if someone had forewarned me, though, I wouldn’t have expected the party we walked into.

The auditorium was filled with shouting, chanting, screaming, yelling, singing kids. Teams had their own t-shirts and held up signs with their school names on them. It was like a big, messy political convention. Kids marched up and down the aisles, jamming their signs in the air, and cheering themselves on. And when the MC got up on stage to start the ceremony, he did what everyone expected him to do. He shouted, “Are you ready to party!” This, of course, drove the audience into a frenzy, and then he asked, “Who let the dogs out?” I really hoped he was going to follow that with, “No seriously. Who let them out? I’m looking for my puppy.”

Then the awards came, fast and furious. The announcer mentioned some of the top schools in each category (RadioDI was Colleen’s team’s category), and then invited the top three teams onto the stage for their medals. The top school in each category was then invited to to compete at the state level, and from there, national.

When it came time to announce the winners for RadioDI, Colleen’s teammates huddled together and held hands. The MC rattled off some team names of schools that did well, and then, only lacking a drum roll, he announced third place: Olsen Park Elementary, Colleen’s team.

Third place! Their first year of competing and they came in third out of twenty! The team jumped up and, as if by instinct, ran for the stage for their medals and photo ops, nearly knocking over several other teams who, in their depression, held their school signs limply at their sides.

It was invigorating to see all the kids in that auditorium parading around, proud of what they had done that day. Every kid on every team had a part to play. Everyone had to think through their challenges. Everyone had to come up with creative, new, and cool ideas and then make them live in front of audiences full of strangers. They all had to come up with new ways of looking at the world and new ways of figuring out their place in it.

I loved it.

When we got back home later that night, I lugged a tightly bundled, fast-asleep Colleen out of the van and whispered to her: “There’s my superstar.”

She opened one eye and looked at me. “I don’t want to be a superstar. I just want to be asleep.”

And there, after a busy day full of imagination, I realized that sometimes the best dreams are the ones where you lay down flat and let your big day just dance around you, like a ghost in a graveyard, like a creaky gate sound effect, offstage, miles away.

Family of the Year

The Big News here recently was that the Amarillo Public Library named us Family of the Year (we're actually the official family for the Southwest Branch; each of the five branches got its own family). The official story and pictures are here (you're supposed to have registered on the site to read the article, but thanks to bugmenot, you can use flufferflogger for the name and 123456 for the password).

The first thing we had to do was get our picture taken by a newspaper photographer, so we piled into the van and made our way to the library's main branch, which is downtown. It was cold and rainy that night, and it was one of the rare times we actually had to use an umbrella here. This, of course, made a complete mess of dripping, squeaking, sloshing things once we got inside the library, but once we got all that under control we met the photographer, and he asked us to sit in front of the computers so he could take our picture.

The computers? I asked him to reconsider, but for some strange reason that neither I nor Ansel Adams would ever be able to answer, he thought having us sit next to a table of ugly, bulky, boxy, punch-card era computers would scream "Reading is good!" Oh well. It's hard enough to wrangle the three kids, particularly when they're wet, into the right order with the right smiles, so I didn't fight it too much and decided to pout about it later when I knew for certain that I could absolutely do nothing about it.

The article came out in the newspaper a week or so later. That morning I got a call at work from someone in our I.S. department. He wanted to know how he could get his kids and wife to be family of the year, so I told him it took me three years working as a Columbia drug mule just to raise the cash to bribe the head librarian. He did not think this was very funny, and then he told me his wife made it perfectly clear that they were going to be Family of the Year next time or he would be in very hot water. I suggested that they might actually go to the library once or twice, but I fear he had already discounted this idea as being too difficult to sustain.

The ceremony took place this past Saturday at the main library. Each branch librarian introduced their family, and when it was our turn we stood there in front of a smallish (and politely quiet - it was a library after all) group. Suzanne was, of course, perfect. I was not. I stupidly and awkwardly held Alex in front of me like a shield to prevent me from making some inane and idiotic joke involving either William Shatner, monkeys, or the Gutenberg Bible. I am always embarrassed by these public introductions and unless the next thing I do is a magic trick, I'm not sure how to exit the stage gracefully. This one particularly flummoxed me because I felt as though I were a fraud, having no business up there. Suzanne is the one who should have gotten all the recognition, since he is the one who takes the kids to the library every week, knows all the librarians, and can recite the Pass the Beanbag song from story time by heart. Me? When the reference librarian asks me if I need any help, I shake him off as if he's got the Black Death and then run down the Large Print Fiction aisle, pretending I know exactly where I'm going. This is not the behavior expected from a Family of the Year member.

The reception for all the families was very nice. There was some tasty cake, cookies, and punch. All the kids from all the families got along very well, especially when they were devouring the snacks. One of the moms looked very familiar to both me and Suzanne, and after talking with her for a few minutes we found out that she had been in my college graduating class, which might have been why I thought I knew her. Yet, I rarely did anything in college but study and write essays, so unless she had played that water gun assassination game, the odds were against me knowing her from there. Suzanne said this mom had that vague, familiar look about her that some people have. Those are the people you look at twice, scratch your head, think about it for a minute, and then move on to something else. That must have been it.

Well, as Family of the Year we received an engraved plaque (with the same picture on it that was in the newspaper), a framed certificate, and an atlas of the world (this one is pretty nifty). Now we can always know who we are, why we are, and where we are.

Now all we have to do is start working on Family of the Decade. I don't think they have such a thing, but don't count us out yet.

Speech Tourney 2005

Like last year, I was invited to be a judge at the Tascosa High School speech tournament. They invited me mainly because they called me, asked me, and I said yes. I think they decided on me because of the way I answered the phone.

This year I picked three categories for my critical eye: Humor, Poetry, and Extemporaneous, but when I got to the high school they changed things up on me and stuck me, first thing, into Original Oratory. I walked to the room, steely-eyed and stern-faced, ready for the students to wither under my intimidating glare, but that was all for nothing, because no one was in the room when I arrived. After triple-checking the room number, I sat and waited, flipping pathetically through my vastly uninteresting magazine.

A minute later an older guy walked into the room and gave me a weird, suspicious look.

“You a judge?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Me too. Do I know you?”

I shrugged and resisted the temptation to give my favorite answer because Suzanne has prohibited me from saying it anymore (it used to be: “Well, I’m the star of several major motion pictures” - my writing it here is technically a loophole because I did not say it).

“Yeah,” he said. “I know you. I see you at the office. I’m the UPS guy.”

I had to think for a minute and then had to picture him dressed all in brown, and once I did that, sure enough, it was the UPS guy. And right then he jumped up from his chair and announced quite forcefully that he was in the wrong room.

“You’re the UPS guy and you got the address wrong?” I said.

“It happens,” he said and ran out into the hallway, leaving me alone to ponder on-time deliveries.

After Original Oratory (which turned out to be a series of ten minute prepared speeches on a variety of topics - one was Reality . . . Really? in which the speaker, a dynamic and frightening girl, wondered why reality TV shows were called that because they certainly weren’t based in reality. Come on, she pleaded, if you were a survivor on an island, would you really do challenges to get rewards instead of hunting boar.

Sometimes it’s hard to listen when the miss the point by a couple of billion miles.

My next topic was a debate in which two teams of two argued about the U.N. and whether it should provide military support to countries. This concluded with something about pirates in the Pacific Ocean and the irrelevance of money. The oddest part was the third judge who sat in the corner away from everyone. At the end of the debate, she refused to shake hands with the panelists, calling herself a germaphobe. This was a drag because, even though the students’ debate points and arguments were pretty wacky, they all tried very hard to do well. She could have shaken their hands and then used a baby wipe to destroy any evil high school germs that might have infected her.

In my last round, I had a sheet of five quotations from which the eight speakers had to pick one and then talk about it. They had seven minutes for the whole presentation, including prep time to make their case. Three of the speakers were obvious football players. Obvious because they were gigantic, with necks the size of Thanksgiving turkeys, and because they mentioned football in every one of their speeches. Now when I saw these guys march into the room I have to admit I had a little bias against them, thinking that they’d pretty much come across as goofy lunkheads, but I was quite wrong. They were articulate, logical, and passionate in what they had to say. And even though their themes kept coming back to football, what they said made pretty good sense.

Compare that to the tall, lanky, black-framed, thick-goggled chess club president-type kid who came in to do his speech. He greeted me quite professionally, answered my questions about time signals nicely (“I’d like to be notified when I’ve used two minutes of prep, and then could you tell me when I’m three minutes down, then one, then thirty seconds”), but when he started talking and ocean of sweat erupted on his forehead and his voice went from calm to Don Knotts shaky. It was terrible. He clutched his hands in front of him, tottered between his two feet, stopped, started, stuttered, halted, grasped for words, and, in general, look miserably lost. Someone had taken his twenty-sided dice and had rolled a 00.

There are kids, like this one, who know when they’ve had it. Some keep going, flailing, and some just stop and give you a look that says, “That’s all I got.” When they know they haven’t done too well, they simply walk quickly out of the room and put it all behind them, and the move on to the next cheeseburger.

Maybe there’s a secret to life in there somewhere. Try your best and when you’ve had it, shrug, and move on out the door. Oh, apathy isn’t that easy, not when you’re older than high school age. It’s easy to say shrug it off, but when you’re writing a page of comments for a kid in a speech tournament who might never pay attention to what you’re trying to say, it’s not so easy to stop. And as much as I think they don’t want to hear my prattle on their score sheets, I know that next year that phone is going to ring again, and sure enough, I’m going to answer it.

Swiss Cheese is Holy for a Reason

One of our churchly duties is to spend every few months teaching children's Sunday School. We do this for about six weeks or so and then we switch out with another group of teachers. This is called the Rotation Sunday School method, and it's supposed to be designed so that adults don't get too burned out (which usually manifests itself during Seinfeld reruns late Saturday night when you inevitably start thinking, "Oh man, tomorrow morning I've got to do what?").

This past Sunday I was in the Music and Games room (there are a variety of rooms in our rotation plan: storytelling, computers, food, arts and crafts) with the first-graders. We were talking about a couple of things, my strategy being to keep them busy before they attacked me while hunting for snacks. One of our topics was What Are You Thankful For?

The kids, as usual, didn't know where to start on a question like this, so they hmmmed and hemmed and looked around for answers on the ceiling until they came up with ingenious and well-thought out answers such as: I'm thankful for this room, the carpet, the air, the sky, people, my family, my feet.

One small girl then spoke up and said shyly, "I'm thankful for cheeses."

At this point I became quite excited and asked her, "Really? What kind. Stilton, chedder, swiss? I like gouda myself."

She looked at me blankly. "I pray for cheeses."

"Who doesn't?" I asked. "Especially on rye."

She became very quiet, her eyes wide, and then suddenly I understood.

"You mean Jesus, didn't you?" I asked. "Not cheeses."

"Cheeses," she nodded.

If I ran a Sunday school deli, maybe I'd do better.