Observing Students and Nature

I'm back tonight from an overnight stay in New Town, ND. Yep, another field experience in their public schools for our students majoring in education. We spend two days in the elementary school, middle school, and high school and stay overnight at Four Bears Casino and Lodge just outside of town. Our university students serve as aides to the teachers, helping out however possible, interacting with students, observing instructional techniques, and getting a feel for another community, its school system, and its student body.

It's a good opportunity for me to get to know the university students better, too, since we spend time together on the bus traveling to and fro New Town, in the schools each day, and of course at the lodge at night. I like this group of students and look forward to working with them in future courses, too. They're just starting their education course work, but already they have keen insights into what to do and what not to do as teachers--and why to do or not do it.

Our rooms last night were on the third floor of the lodge, and I had a south-facing window looking out over the rising Missouri River, covered in patches of snow-dusted, melting ice. The hills above the river banks rise up toward the vast blue sky, and as evening falls, the line blurs between the hilltops and the sky; but the lights from the casino and the bridge spanning Lake Sakakawea cast a glow on the water and make it look like the river is the only thing to see outdoors. It's quite beautiful.

Happy New Year!

We rang in the new year by inviting three couples and their kids over to our house for a family-friendly night of games and food last night. One couple had to decline when the husband's out-of-state parent was hospitalized, so it was Leslie (one of Susan's colleagues), her husband Dave, and their two boys, and our neighbors Chuck and Reba and their two kids. Dave is a police officer who was on duty last night, so actually he stopped by for only a few minutes between calls. When he arrived at our front door in full uniform, Chuck and Reba's little four-year-old boy stood with wide eyes and dropped mouth, wondering who knows what! All he said to Dave was, "Those handcuffs are real!" I wonder what our neighbors thought when they saw the police car on the street and a cop entering our home!

Susan made gallons and gallons of homemade soup: one cheesy potato and bacon soup and one Southwestern chicken soup (both inspired by our recent trip to Harwood--thank you, Janelle!). Leslie made sub sandwiches to slice and share: one roast beef and horseradish and one turkey and bacon, both on loaves of delicious bread. Reba made a fantastic spinach dip that we gobbled up on wheat crackers. The rest of the spread, courtesy of Susan, included chips, veggies and dip, Christmas baking and candy, and a variety of adult beverages and bottles of soda for the kids.

While the kids played downstairs (hide and seek, board games, little-boy-friendly toys from my own childhood collection, and karaoke on the machine that the girls got from Uncle Jerrett for Christmas--a hu-u-u-uge hit in our household!), the adults visited and ate. Leslie and her boys had to make an earlyish exit to get her littlun into bed, but Chuck and Reba stayed until about 2:00 A.M.! We hustled the kids upstairs just before midnight to join us in a toast (champagne for the adults, sparkling cider for the kids) after a countdown to the new year. Everybody got a New Year's kiss, too, although all kissing was contained to one's own family members. We adults played many rounds of Catch Phrase, the electronic music edition, and laughed ourselves silly. It was a terrific time.

The girls and I reheated soup for breakfast this morning! It was a leisurely day. Jordanne, the little girl who lives next door, spent most of today at our house, and she and our daughters made several craft projects that the girls had gotten for Christmas (thank you, Dennis and Julie!) while Susan worked at scrapbooking and sorted through photographs. She made us a special New Year's supper: broiled filet mignon, twice-baked potatoes, steamed asparagus with hollandaise sauce, crab chunks with melted butter, shrimp cocktail, and Suzanna's birthday cake for dessert. We finished watching A Christmas Story (started the night of Suzanna's birthday) and started watching A Christmas Memory. A very relaxing start to the new year. Here's hoping for another terrific year . . . which will be documented, no doubt, for your edification on this very blog!

Road Trips

One part of my job involves supervising pre-service teachers (also often referred to as student-teachers) doing their internships in area schools. Most of those schools are within the city, but this semester I also have a per-service teacher in Hettinger, ND and another in Sidney, MT. Furthermore, twice per semester another professor and I take a busload of prospective Teacher Education majors to New Town, ND for a field experience during which they observe classrooms and help out however the teachers choose (e.g., handing out papers, working with small groups, etc.).

Moral of the story: I have been doing a lot of driving recently for work. The route southward to Hettinger takes me on gently curving roads through occasionally hilly terrain past vast fields and pastures toward the SD border. The road also happens to be a grotesque battlefield strewn with the corpses of pheasants, raccoons, rabbits, skunks, cats, deer, and other critters that have "played chicken" with oncoming vehicles and lost. Hettinger takes two-and-a-half hours round trip.

The route to Sidney takes me first on Interstate 94 through the rugged Badlands of southwest ND and into the plains of eastern MT until I get to Glendive. Then I head north on a curvy, hilly highway alongside the impressive Yellowstone River and through some alternating areas of woods and fields and pastures. Homicidal deer lie in wait along either side of the highway between Glendive and Sidney, the animal kingdom's equivalent of suicide bombers. Sidney takes four-and-a-half hours round trip.

The route to New Town takes me north through the Killdeer Mountains, a gorgeous part of the state but a treacherous section of highway on which motorists are well advised to heed the ever-changing speed limit advisories. 45 miles per hour may be fine for this half-mile, but when the sign says to drive 20 miles per hour when rounding the next curve, it means it. Going off the road would mean tumbling to a certain death at the foot of the mountains, careening first through trees and rocks past many thousands of years of layers of minerals exposed by glacial activity and finally coming to rest in a tangled heap of metal and charred flesh upon the grassy grazing grounds of bison (a scenic route toward death, I suppose, should one have the wits about him/her at the time to take in the beauty en route to one's demise).

You might have already guessed this, but deer hide out in the ditches along this stretch of the road, too, waiting to leap out at the most inopportune time. It requires a keen eye, enjoying not only the beauty of the terrain but also watching out for deer and paying close attention to the speed limits. Cattle, too, are a common sight right in the middle of the highway. There are certain parts of the highway at which I know that I will see a rogue cow, having escaped the fence and "making a run for it," albeit with the speed of a bovine . . . which, to the human eye, looks like a film in slow motion mode. Why those particular ranchers don't fix their fences is beyond me. There was a cow out on the road on my way back from Sidney, too, this week, so perhaps modern cattle have evolved into wilier creatures than I remember.

After making it alive to the north side of the Killdeer Mountains, one finds oneself on the Fort Berthold Reservation, and the section through which the highway winds has steep hills and winding roads and gorgeous trees. Nearing New Town, one discovers the Four Bears Bridge spanning Lake Sakakawea. Large bodies of water always impress me, and the bridge offers an excellent vantage point for taking in the grandeur of the incoming Missouri River and the lake that stretches off to the north and west. New Town takes three hours round trip.

Once I'm in Hettinger or Sidney or New Town, I'm busy in the school observing the pre-service teacher or supervising the field experience students in their classrooms. However, there isn't much to do while driving to each destination besides take in the scenery and think--sometimes in my head, sometimes aloud (worthwhile radio stations fade out of reach long before I get wherever I'm going). When I ignore the carnage of roadkill and the threatening stare of diabolical roadside ungulates, I can appreciate the beauty of the rugged buttes and verdant valleys, the rolling rivers and majestic lakes, the fading grasses, and the trees whose leaves are bright green at the bottom but progressively more golden toward the top.

One doesn't normally associate such a mix of beauty and danger with training future teachers, but that's my life! (Or maybe it's just life as I see it.)

Surgery and Four Other Important Items

So much to tell! This post has gotta have a checklist (in rhyme, for your edification):

1. school shopping
2. birthday greeting
3. skin chopping
4. outdoor eating
5. classroom hopping/teacher meeting

Yesterday Hillary had a medical appointment in Bismarck (more on that in a moment), so we left early enough to spend the morning there shopping for school supplies (1) and a li'l' home decor (photo frames). Then we met the girls' aunt Cheryl and cousin Arron for dinner at T.G.I. Friday's; it was also Cheryl's birthday yesterday (2), so I allowed her to sit directly across from me as a special birthday treat for her. I'm nice that way. That Arron just keeps maturing--he looks years older every time I see him! The girls just love him, and he's so tolerant of their hugging and hanging on and storytelling, etc.

We love the kinds of expressions we get from subjects when we make them pose with the sun shining directly into their eyeballs. Left to right: Hillary, Cheryl, Abigail, Arron, and Suzanna outside T.G.I. Friday's.

Afterward we went shoe shopping for the girls, and even I got a new pair! (I'm suddenly picturing myself at a craps table, blowing on the dice: "Come on! Daddy needs a new pair of shoes!" I'm weird.) Then it was on to Hillary's appointment.

Hillary has a good-sized congenital nevus (mole present at birth) on her left side, and in recent months two darkish spots have appeared near its center. We had her doctor in Dickinson look at it, and he referred us to a dermatologist in Bismarck. The dermatologist (Dr. Cornatzer) recommended removing it--not only for cosmetic reasons (which aren't on Hillary's mind now but which will become important to her as she ages) but also to prevent the risk of its becoming malignant in the future, especially in light of the recent changes to its appearance. We were in and out of his office in a half-hour, and before we left, he had arranged an appointment for us later that very day with a plastic surgeon!

We did a little clothes shopping for Susan between appointments and then met the plastic surgeon (Dr. Paulson), who concurred with the dermatologist and then set about seeing when there would be openings in the Bismarck hospitals for him to perform Hillary's surgery (3). The earliest option: Thursday! of this week! that's tomorrow! That's the first day of the school year in Dickinson, and Susan cannot miss opening day at her new job; so I'll accompany Hillary tomorrow.

Missing the first day of the new school year is not bothering Hillary. Nor is the prospect of going under the knife. When the dermatologist left the room to phone the plastic surgeon, Hillary did cry, but for a very different reason: she's going to miss her birthmark. It's something that she and she alone has; it makes her different from her sisters, whom she is alike in so many other ways, and it certainly makes her different from most other kids. In conversations later last night and today, she anthropomorphized the mole, telling me that "he" is always with her, that she enjoys seeing him and washing him in the shower or the bathtub, etc.

Susan and I were thinking as Future Hillary might: that, if she has to have a lesion surgically removed, at least it's a plastic surgeon doing it whose skill will leave minimal evidence of the mole. However we suddenly found ourselves trying to comfort Hillary instead with the thought that, although the birthmark will be gone, at least she'll always have a scar to remind her of happier days with her mole. It's such a sweet perspective that she has toward the nevus . . . and undeniably odd, too.

All this has been in the midst of preparations for the start of another school year. We left Bismarck Tuesday right after the appointment with the plastic surgeon and made it back in time to attend (Susan and I; her dad, Roger, came to our house to stay with the girls) a pre-semester social (4) at the home of DSU's new president and his wife. Their back yard was elegantly appointed with numerous tables set with linens and summery decorations. Three food stations were situated beneath tents around the yard: a beverage table, an appetizer table, and tables for the entrées (toward the end of the evening, the appetizer table was reset with desserts). The food was fantastic, the weather was perfect, and we enjoyed visiting with the other faculty and staff members in attendance.

Tonight we attended (as a family this time--kids were invited to this one) a barbecue at the home of the chair of my department. He and his wife had all departmental faculty members and their families over for hamburgers and bratwursts made on the grill, and everybody who came brought a salad or dessert so that there was quite a feast laid out for us! It was my first social occasion with my new colleagues, and again, Susan and I had a good time getting to know people. One professor new to our department is new to the state, too, so she, her husband, and their son had the opportunity tonight to meet new people, get some questions answered (e.g., "What bank do you recommend?"), and start to feel a little more at home in Dickinson.

Before the barbecue, however, we went to the girls' elementary school for an open house (5). All the teachers were in their rooms ready to meet the students, show them to their desks, and answer any questions that kids or parents might have about the start of school tomorrow. Hillary's second-grade teacher was also Abigail's, so we knew her already when we stopped by with Hillary's school supplies (and with the news that Hillary will miss the first day due to her surgery). Abigail's fourth-grade teacher was also Suzanna's, and Suzanna's fifth-grade teacher was also Susan's sister Cassie's many a year ago . . . so, again, no new faces to meet for either our kids or their teachers. Still it's exciting to get the notebooks and pencils into the desks, the name tags on top of the desks, the lockers assigned, the friends in the hallways hugged after weeks or months of not having seen them, etc. The girls are all very excited for school to start!

Hillary agrees with the "School is fun" motto pasted on her second-grade classroom door.

Abigail is all smiles in anticipation of her fourth-grade year!

This might be Suzanna's teacher's final year after a long career in the district, so Suzanna might have the distinction of being in her final class. Only spring will tell . . .