Note: This is from yesterday. I'll write about today's events tonight. For those of you who don't know what's going on in my life right now (read: mostly everyone), Esther and I are up at our state capitol assisting with a math & science camp for inner-city kids. It's been an interesting few days... I would really like to come back again sometime soon.

9 June 2008

Hmm... Today was more exhausting than yesterday. I got more sleep and didn’t have any horrible nightmares, so that was good. It started out much as I had remembered the Math & Science Camp that we helped with two years ago, with Amber and I copying the template for a trebuchet onto card stock for the kids.

But then it went back to Math & Science Camp 2008... Which essentially means that the kids have absolutely no will to do anything except break others’ creations, and take the broken pieces and throw them around and hurt others. It is just frustrating to watch them.

While I’m in the midst of the kids, it’s hard to think about anything but them. But once I’m away, it’s interesting to ponder the day. The only two kids who actually built a trebuchet were Alec and Roger, who I worked one-on-two with... The rest of the guys their age and a little older were sitting around talking about all sorts of crap that I would have blushed to hear if I wasn’t quite so deaf and hadn’t been so in la-la-land...

It was made even longer by the fact that we had to quickly clean the sanctuary in preparation for a dinner put on for the local homeless people. Maybe Satan was trying to do a double-whammy here, but we were totally exhausted after running around after the kids and then cleaning, and then Mrs. Lin lost her keys in the confusion when someone put them away with everything else. After an hour of searching in the storage room through all the stuff we had been using that day, we finally found the keys (totally a God thing...) and went home to make spaghetti for supper.

At the camp, however, the kids finished up their spaghetti bridges (don’t know WHY we ate spaghetti tonight, except that there weren’t so many noodles flying around today), made the trebuchets, ate lunch (which was watched by inspectors from the FDA...), played outside, then came back in and worked more on the trebuchets and built a bridge with blocks. After the bridge, the kids tested their eggs, and more importantly, the protection they had put around the eggs, by dropping them off a ladder. The ones who had done a good enough job and kept the eggs from breaking when dropped were given prizes. I cleaned while they were doing that.

I’m learning that the best policy with the really annoying kids is to just YELL at them when they are not behaving. After I did that twice with Avery (one who I was totally having attitude issues with yesterday and then this morning), he was much more willing to respect me and listen to what I told him to do.