My sister, Jackie, has a neighbor who got married this weekend. She asked me to be her plus one so I went to the wedding with her. It was in a church neither one had been to before. It was Centro Cristiano in Springdale, near Tontitown. We were surprised how big it was. I would estimate there were 200-250 there. Much of the service was done in Spanish and also in English. The reception was a sit down dinner. We sat at a table that had names of the people who were to eat there. The Dominguez family sat with us. As soon as the young girl sat down she looked at me and said she thought she knew me. When I told her I had taught school with the name of Whelchel and she immediately knew me. She was the daughter of a couple who had been Amanda’s softball coaches. When they sat down they recognized me, too. I had worked in the summer at a JTPA program. Their son Chuck had worked with us all three summers we had the program. The last day we had the program that summer the kids played a kickball game to find out who won the home run score. The teenagers played with the kids each day. The big boys would carry the little ones around the bases and run with them around the bases. We had had such hot weather for a week or so and we just had to finish the game our last day of the program. One of the Edens boys and Chuck ran into each other at home base! Chuck broke his nose and the Edens player had a cut above his eye. The blood was enough to make everyone get excited! I raced Chuck to the hospital to meet his dad. The other injury was washed off and didn’t need any stitches. His parents remember that day, too.
The Job Training Partnership Act was a great way to teach teenagers how to work. Linda Parker and I worked together for three years. The third teacher worked with us one year. We each worked with four high school kids who were the teachers. They had twelve students each. Six in the morning and six in the afternoon. We had almost 150 students in the program. The “teachers” had to be at work on time, plan lessons for their students and teach them. We helped them write the plans and we made sure they stayed on task and taught the skills correctly. It was a wonderful program.
The Razorbacks played great until half time. The fourth quarter was better after a terrible third quarter even though we didn’t win. But having two overtimes looked pretty good. I am expecting the season to look good as we clean up our problem areas. Go Hogs Go!
When I think about how long it has been since I graduated from Jasper High School, I am amazed how long it has been. Sixty years has gone by so quickly. It is hard to believe how long it has been since 1964. When I taught in Mountain View Middle School, the kids wrote in a journal every day. Some days we let them know we were going to share and other days it was going to be a private writing. After a few months we would have the kids share what they had written on a certain day. It was so much fun to see how little they recalled about that day. I used to tell them to put that journal in a drawer and forget about it until a number of years later. I am not sure how many did that but it would have been fun to see how much they had remembered. Their memories could have been a good start for a book. Some of our students were exceptional writers. Some were prose writers and others poetry writers. It was fun to see them develop over the years. We had them from sixth to eighth grade.
