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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Mandy Wichert. I love to read historical fiction and non-fiction, and I believe if you aren’t learning you aren’t living. Today we’re talking about calling an audible – to make a last minute change after a play has been called.
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What I Learned Yesterday:
This week my children’s school is preparing for a Boosterthon. The Boosterthon is a big fundraising event, that provides an opportunity for kids to request pledges in dollar amounts based on a set number of laps they run around a track. The kids collect pledges of $1 and up per lap and can run as few as 30 or as many as 35 laps on a track where each lap is 1/16 of a mile. The money that the school collects this year will go toward collecting books for mini-libraries with age-appropriate books for each grade. A large part of the Boosterthon is getting the kids excited and eager about the fun run and also to raise school spirit leading up to the event.
This year, I signed up to help with door decorating. This is my first time to have a child old enough to really participate in any of the PTO activities. It’s also the first year that I’ve had enough “time” and freedom to be able to participate in such activities myself. I was excited to help Jonas’ classroom and he was equally as excited that he would be able to have me at his school for some time during the day. My girls have been really good sports, helping me with decorating where able and entertaining themselves at the school when their help was not helping.
We were given a theme to base our door design on, and there will be a contest for the best decorated door. The winning door will receive a party for the classroom, so of course all of the mom’s volunteering their time would like to contribute to a well-designed door. I researched using Pinterest and Google for ideas based on the given theme and came up with a few broad ideas before the day to decorate arrived. We were given very few instructions, except that the door decorating could not start until Monday and had to be completed by Friday. Also, we were unsure what supplies would be available to us, so too much planning was not beneficial, with so many unknowns.
A small group of classroom volunteers shot ideas back and forth about possible designs and door themes to coordinate with the overall Boosterthon theme. Then we scheduled a time when we could meet together to begin. The person coordinating the door decorating for us was not able to meet on the day we determined due to an illness in her family, but gave us free reign to plan our door in her absence. The other volunteer and I quickly got to work, thinking that we would be able to come up with a plan and get the majority of the door decorated in the brief time we had allotted.
We came up with a great theme based on the popular video game “Just Dance”, drew up a rough sketch and began cutting out letters and taking measurements. We were there 3 hours when we decided to add an audience to our door using photos of the classes students in various dance poses. The teacher graciously allowed us to use the end of the day to shuffle each child out one by one to a blue backdrop to strike their best dance pose. After taking all 24 photos we asked the teacher for one final photo – her own. She obliged us and struck a great dance pose, then informed us that the class had chosen a “team name” . She said “I’m not sure if it will help at all, but we chose “Ms. G’s Guitar Heroes”….oh no…..The other volunteer and I went completely silent….as the teacher politely explained that we did not have to follow that team name, but that she thought we might like to know. We definitely did…and it was VERY helpful….but we had already invested so much of our time and energy into the other theme that we were also a little worried that we had wasted our time.
On the way back to the work room, we lamented over not getting that information sooner. We thought of all of the things we could have done with such an excellent team name, then we had an epiphany. We quickly re-evaluated what work we had already done and re-imagined it into a “Guitar Hero” video game theme. We decided that we could still use the kids doing their dance moves as an audience and were also able to get one final shot of the teacher playing some awesome air guitar. All was not lost! We were creative and flexible and ended up coming up with another idea that was almost just as good!
After nearly four hours we finally went home without managing to get a single piece of paper on the door. We DID however have a solid plan in place for what we’d do next and we finally had all the information to get us there! (At least that’s true for now).
What did I Learn?
In football, after a play has been called and the team takes the field, on occasion the quarterback has to make a last minute change of plans based on how the defense is anticipating his movements. This last minute change is called “Calling an Audible”. In a sense, after we gathered the new information, we had to call an audible on the door design. Now we know, that before starting a big project it’s prudent to have as much information as possible. If something seems ambiguous, try to make sure you have the information you need before plowing ahead and finding out later, only to do double the work. If the information changes in the middle of a big project, don’t worry! Be flexible and creative, use your ingenuity to come up with a new plan and carry on: call in an audible.
The class and teacher are very thankful for our assistance and excited that we were willing to help. The door design was not what we had originally planned, but it still looks great! Even if we don’t win the grand prize, we will still hopefully give the students something to be excited about and a sense of pride, fun, school spirit and anticipation when they enter their classroom. They are already winners – and so are we!
I’m Mandy Wichert, and this has been, “Stuff I Learned Yesterday.”
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