Friday, September 24, 2010

Organizational Charts by Teens

House Day. You don't appreciate the work it takes to put the day together until you do it yourself. No, I did not do it singlehandedly, but the Student Prez. and Veep spent many hours preparing and the whole House Day ready to intervene. When the duties for the day were divied up, the task came down to each individual. As a peripheral member of the "Student Gov" through the student paper, I was given the nerdish role of supervising Trivia. My duties came down to this list:

Find your House Members (the system was devised in 1987, before Harry Potter) and mark their hands A- D for rotations.
Ask yourself these questions:
Where this group of kids is supposed to go:
Which group should be arriving next:
Did anyone get lost, voluntarily or intentionally*?
For trivia: find replacements to fill seats left vacant by disappearing souls.

*Note to pundits who think us at the Abbey are nerds: Kids were skipping out of Trivia, not Football.

Even good planning can fall to pieces. I applaud quick response to a fiasco relating to the scavenger hunt. It took the kids 15 minutes (out of 45 planned) to complete the odyssey. After one rotation (of 4), the activity was scrapped and the old standby of "Protect the Wall" resurrected. The kids were grateful, too, that there was one less academic activity for the day.

After finding enough warm bodies to fill Trivia seats, I was getting a little fever for the game myself. Even though Seniors aren't technically allowed to, I got my turn to compete on stage just before the day was over. My brilliance did not overwhelm the other Grade 9-12 contestants, so I wasn't by-lined after answering 10 questions!

A clear-cut test of organizational success is the ice cream service. How long was the wait? Not long at all, since we pre-scooped.

The temperature reached over 90 degrees with high humidity, but no results of heat casualties. Accolades for water service and frequent-enough breaks from activities. By the last rotation at high noon, I received plenty of help for inside the air conditioned theater!

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