Senior Trip, Day 3

Or should I say day 2, continued, since day 3 started only a few hours after the chaperoning business concluded during the night.

The weather was pretty lousy, so we decided not to go to Dorney Park and to just stay at the resort for a few more hours. Because we had to get out of the rooms, everyone dumped their bags in Governor's Ballroom C (I'm sorry, I think I can say with absolute certainty that the governor has never held a ball here and even if he did he would have used the much grander Governor's Ballroom B or perhaps the mythical Governor's Ballroom A, which we never saw) and then moved on to whatever indoor activities were available in the morning. As best I could see, that mostly included, bowling, arcade games, signing each other's yearbooks, or the always-popular, waiting to get served at the restaurant.

The restaurant really reminded me of when we went to Paris and 2 747's arrived and there was one immigration officer there to process all 600 people. Imagine that a plane might show up at the airport full of people! Imagine that people might show up at a hotel coffee shop at 9AM and want breakfast! Forty minutes for a toasted bagel and half a grapefruit. This yielded a visit to the hotel desk to say that we couldn't check out in time because of how long breakfast took.

In spite of Ballroom C's lack of character, it was nice to have someplace to hang out and I was able to do some of my least favorite work, that being making up incorrect answers to multiple choice questions. This is more subtle and difficult than you might believe. You can't ask the question, what's the vertex of y = x^2 + 6x + 8 and give and answer of 17. It has to be something that could possible (the smiley-face graph aside).

It got boring enough that a bunch of students joined in the morning BINGO game. And yes, bingo is just as exciting as you remember. The highlight was the special game where you had to fill your B row and your O row and when you won you had to stand up all call out "I have BO." For some reason, by the time that was over, most of the students had left. Do people even know what BO means anymore? That term, if you can call it that, was invented by an ad agency in the 1950's to sell a product called Ban deodorant. I'm not sure if they still sell Ban

Then it was time to gather on the buses and head home. We watched "The Goonies," which was fun. And then it was done.

At the risk of sounding mushy, I love this group of seniors. I've never met a group of kids that I've been this fond of. I would have loved to have friends like them when I was in school. So taking a trip like this was absolutely the highlight of my teaching career. I wish I'd been able to spend more time with certain people, but I'm hopeful that I can keep in touch with them.