The Washington Wizards

Last Friday after school I went on my first field trip as a teacher!  Our PE teacher has a program at our school called ACE.  I'm not exactly sure what those letter stand for... Anyway, it's a program for 4th and 5th grade boys who are borderline behavior problems.  It's essentially to help "push" them back over the borderline to the nice kid side.  Once per week, our PE teacher has a two hour meeting with them.  The first hour they have a Character Education lesson where each week is focused on one particular character trait, like honesty, self-respect, responsibility, loyalty, etc.  Then they practice one hour of basketball and try to apply that character trait to the sport of basketball.  They even get to play a few games against a few other schools in the county.  They won for the first time on Wednesday, then on Friday evening, we took them to a Washington Wizards game.  It was awesome!  Some of them had never even been out of Salisbury before(!), let alone a professional basketball game.

They were soooo excited!   Every single white building that they saw they were all screaming, "That's the White House!  There it is!"  And to every black man they yelled, "There's Obama!  I saw the President!"  Unfortunately, they weren't kidding.  They have no concept of big cities and stuff like that so it was pretty weird. Also... on the way there... every tiny bridge that we crossed, whether it was over a creek or a river or whatever, they would yell, "Oh my gosh!  This is my first time on the Bay Bridge!  It's awesome!".  They had no idea.  Their jaws dropped when we actually went over it!

So, needless to say, it was a great experience for them.  They didn't care that the Wizards (the lowest ranked team in the NBA) played against the Cavaliers (the second lowest ranked team in the NBA).  They were just excited to see that many people in one place and to witness a professional game and buy a souvenir.  Most of them only had a few bucks from their parents so they just bought a small sweatband or something.  But they were happy!  And they will never forget this trip!

Boys will be boys...  Click on this photo to enlarge it and see those crazy kids' faces.