The End is Coming...

...of my vacation that is. School starts back up again next week and I'm starting to get back into teaching mode. It's always weird to start the school year again because for me that happens near the beginning of summer. It's even weirder this time because I attended graduation ceremonies for some of my former students yesterday. They officially ended their high school careers yesterday, while next Tuesday I'll be getting a whole new batch starting their time in high school.
Here are a quick bunch of unscientific statistics (because I didn't take notes yesterday during the ceremonies) for you about Fremont High in south LA. We have about 5,000 students in four grades spread over three tracks (we are a year around school). Entering Freshmen class is usually something a little over one thousand strong. We had a little over 400 students graduate last night. The rest of the students are either progressing normally, or they are "pluses," as in "he is a nine plus" instead of being a 10th grader. Not a technical term really, but when you have enough kids failing too many classes to progress normally, you tend to make up terms to describe it quickly. So doing rough percentages, less than 50% of the students that enter our high school graduate. On the encouraging side, more than 75% of those graduates are planning on attending and have been accepted into a college or university. And of these students, they received an impressive amount of scholarships, grants and awards. I think that the principal said that the total was something like $300,000. I don't know what is typical, but I was impressed. Of course that only works out to be $1,000 per student but since I got diddly squat, I think that they did well.

Our Weekend with Austin

It is a lot of fun to meet a new friend. It's even funner to meet a new family member and become friends. About a few months ago, we got a phone call from Richard's older brother's ex-wife. She was pregnant when they split up but we didn't know much more than that. The baby is now a 14 year old teenager named Austin. He, his mother Tracy, and his younger sister Alyssa came to visit us this weekend where we got to help celebrate his birthday with him and he got to get to know his father's family. We had a nice, lazy day at the beach on Saturday, we celebrated his birthday on Sunday, and we had several nice meals with various groupings of the family. All designed to give us good "get-to-know-each-other-time." Austin and Randy got along great and have continued to communicate over the internet. All together it was a very good visit.

Happy 5th Birthday Nathan!

My baby is getting so big. Nathan had a pretty good birthday I think. It started on the actual day by being woken up before daddy left to go to work so that we could open presents together. We did leave Joshua asleep so that there wouldn't be any fighting over presents. And yes, that is Christmas wrapping paper.

A little more than a week later we had his birthday party. He had been asking for a party where he could invite friends over since last year. We invited friends from school, church, and all the family over. We played with stickers, jumped on a bounce house,


hit a pinata (my niece Jillian broke it), and enjoyed cake and ice cream. It was a lot of work, but mostly because Richard and I finished off a few outstanding back yard projects in the weeks before the party. Nathan was very happy with it all. He thought that it was a great day and had a wonderful time throughout the entire party. He was even a fairly good host, for a 5 year old.




The funniest thing about all of it is that two weeks after the party, the rental company hasn't picked up the bounce house and we still have it in the back yard.

San Diego pictures

I finally published the entry on our San Diego trip. If you want to see the pictures, please scroll down past the "Goodbye to Mr. Gan" entry.

Good Bye to Preschool

Nathan's preschool had their end of the year party yesterday. Actually I should say their end of the year party for part of the class. The preschool is actually sponsered by the school district (not common) and is on the campus of a local elementary school. It is mainly for high functioning autistic kids, but they have a handful of typical kids to act as peer models. Nathan was one of the peer models and it his role (along with the other typical kids) to just be themselves and socialize with everyone in the class. It was very interesting, especially since half of the time I didn't know which kids were autistic and which were typical. I definetly want to have Joshua be in the same class, especially if Ms. Lara is still there; she was great. I also hope that Nathan has learned a little about accepting people who are different from him. I didn't tell him in the begining that there was anything different about any of the other kids in his class; I didn't want to prejudice him or get him confused. But it has come up a little bit in these last few months when he has asked why so and so doesn't talk very much, and other questions along the same line. I know that Nathan likes all his classmates and that he doesn't really see anything wrong with them. One of his favorite classmates is a little boy who is not as high functioning as some of the others. Nathan will usually say goodbye specifically to him and give him a hug. Tama usually just makes a noise and pushes Nathan away, but Nathan doesn't seem to mind.

Yesterday was a good bye party for the peer models and it was at a place called "Pump it Up," a small ware house type space with four inflatable party jumpers and other structures. It included a large slide, an obstacle course, and a multi use jumper along with a regular jumper. It was a lot of fun and we were all tired afterward. The party ended with pizza and other goodies. Just what a buch of 4 and 5 year olds love.