Spelling Bee Disorganization (or, Cancelled Weekend Plans)

This year I told my friend, Stacy, who is heading up the spelling bee at our school this year, that I would help coach the spellers.  In part, I signed up because I felt guilty about not doing Challenge Club this year, and I wanted to be helping out after school in some way.  

The way Spelling Bee works here is this: first, each grade level does an in-class spelling bee; then, all the class winners from each grade level compete and are narrowed down to the top-three spellers of each grade.  In theory, speller #1 competes at the first competition, speller #2 at the second, and #3 is the backup.  However, we were never given any word about the secondary competition this year, so it looks like spellers 2 and 3 are out of luck. 

I found this picture here in an article about Indian kids
being good spellers.  But don't they kind of resemble
my students a little bit?  :)

Anyways, we went to the Discovery School (a bilingual, not-Christian school here in Tegus.) yesterday to a meeting for coaches. The idea was to determine who would help out in which way (as a word caller, a scribe, a judge, etc.)  

It turned out that our middle-man from our school must have forgotten to return some paperwork, because Stacy, Dan (another coach), and I weren't in the bag of names being "raffled" for helping positions. Since they had enough helpers, many of whom had traveled from across the country to be there and needed to participate in order to validate their long trip, we three were left job-less.  And a little bit resentful of attending a meeting from 4:00-6:00 on a Friday afternoon that ended up not pertaining to us at all. (In addition to pulling names to assign helpers, the meeting consisted of the leaders of the school trying to make motions to change the rules of the game the day before the event.  T.I.H.  This is Honduras.)

So (not-all-that-unfortunately), it is now Saturday and, instead of being stuck inside a room watching kids spell, I'm about to leave and buy some of my favorite things:  craft supplies.  I think I am going to make these for my students for Valentine's Day: 

Happy Saturday!