It has been awhile. Since I last wrote, Romney and Obama have captured their party's nominations to run for president, school has ended, the soccer season came and went and summer is under way.
The main excuse is that I got busy. About the time of my last post, way back in January, I had surgery on my Achilles tendon and heel. There was a trip to the Mennonite Educators conference in suburban DC, where I hobbled around on crutches. That same weekend the co-pastor at my church and his wife were killed in a car wreck leaving behind four children between the ages of 13 and 20 or so. I'm on one of the leadership teams at church(they call it an Elder) so we had to scramble to figure out what to do next. We discovered there really isn't a good map for how to deal with such a tragedy so we have been muddling our way through with the help of our conference leadership and the advice of others. Since they worked with the youth we had to scramble to find people to fill their spots and to piece things together. On top of this we tried to make sure their family members, including the extended family, were being cared for.
Fortunately people have been cooperative and supportive. We now have some interim people in place which will allow us to take our time in figuring out what to do next.
Soccer season came and went. We finished 15-5 so overall it was a good season. The end was disappointing as we lost in the second round of state playoffs in overtime. A week after the season ended I was able to travel to Costa Rica with the Spanish class. I learned some Spanish and it was interesting to see the changes which had taken place in the last twelve years.
This week I am taking a class at Mid-Prairie titled "Learning for the 21st Century" It has been helpful for the most part. The first two days we were led by Brian Mull. He introduced us to ways to use Twitter, Diigo, Google Docs and its various apps, Jinga, Screenr, EasyPoll and a couple other tools I may have missed. Today, Angela Maier, led us in a session titled "Passion Driven Learning." She was quite passionate but half a day might have been enough. Instead we were blessed with her passion for the whole day. Tomorrow we have someone else leading our activities.
