Travesties According to Me

I get the opportunity to work with and teach a lot of different types of students.  Most are in elementary or middle school, some have ADD, some are scared of spiders (or any bug for that manner), some have been to other camps and are fully confident in all of the activities I can offer them.  Some of the students are from this general area, the kind of suburbia that I grew up in.  Occasionally though, we get students direct from the big city, New York.

By the way, it is still completely obvious to anyone that I just moved here when they tell me that the group is "from the city" because I invariably answer "which city?".  Apparently their is only one 'city' around here.  Whatever.

The last group that I worked with, however challenging and rewarding as it may be was one of the groups from the city.  Brooklyn, not that this detail particularly matters.  For this group I even got to help run their campfire.  You know, sing some songs, make some s'mores, that sort of thing.  The biggest challenge of the evening?  Not the fact that it's hard to make 120 sixth graders be quiet.  No.  A large majority of these students (and even teachers and chaperones) had no idea what a campfire/s'more was.  Tragic.

So in short, I would say that this past week my greatest accomplishment was introducing city folk to the joy of burned sugar, melted chocolate and graham crackers.  That night there was one students expression I hope to never forget, even if he was challenging in every class I taught with that group.  

Sounds Tasty

Rummage Sale!

Today I had quite the adventure, not only a shopping trip, but a shopping marathon.  Normally I'm not the shopping type, but today somehow we managed to shop for about four hours.  I was hanging out with a person we'll term 'C' for the next little while.  We found some pretty sweet stuff, including this sweater:

I'm telling you, this sale was the holy grail of all things kitchy.  Who needs fine art in your bathroom when you can have something as great as this?

In addition to kitchy things there were also multiples of just about everything, check out the insane amounts of little play stations:

Trivial Pursuit anybody?  Don't worry about not enough playing cards.  With 13 sets we can keep, oh, say, an entire football team occupied for a decent amount of time.

To finish off the tour of random and odd things, here is a sketchy creepy doll that I found.  I don't know if you can read the label on the tag, the first time I read it I thought it said "... needs new balls".  When in fact it reads "... needs new batts", as in batteries.  I don't even want to know what this thing can do when it's charged up.