School and Spearfishing

Here are some pictures of our classrooms (where we spend most of our time), and a picture from Matt's spearfishing trip.

Here is what students see when they walk into Mindi's room.  

This is what the class looks like from Mindi's podium.  From here she has a great vantage point to keep an eye on all 10 of the students in her biggest class!

Once a week one of her students has to select a place in the world to present a short "travel guide" about the location.  They usually make some food that would be traditional to the place and the class spends a few minutes learning about different places in the world. They map where they have been on this bulletin board.  Also, Mindi keeps track of birthdays on the calenders and they celebrate them! (thanks, Carla)  The students really like it. 

On this bulletin board students have to present a world or U.S. news story to the class.  On the red board her students get see pictures of their teacher when she was in school and growing up.  

 This is my classroom from the front door.  The walls are all painted like the ocean with dolphins and turtles and marlin and fish everywhere.  The tables don't move around, so this is the way it must stay.  I like it for the most part.  The huskers have one of the bulletin boards up front and we have a pick the score contest every week.  There is no football here, so often the score predictions are something like 89-58 or 19-4 or something like that.  Might have been well served to avoid a pick the score game this last weekend.

This is a picture I took when spearfishing last weekend.  Spearfishing was a ton of fun and something we hope to do again.  What you do is you snorkel around until you see the type of fish you are hunting, like grouper.  Then you have dive down about 30 feet to where they are hiding in the coral below.  You have to have enough breath to steady yourself, wait for it to stop moving, shoot it and then pull it in.  That is where it gets tricky.  Because the moment the fish is hit by the spear it starts bleeding and vibrating like crazy, which attracts the sharks.  And the sharks will literally take the fish from you.  So you have to get the fish pulled in against your body because the sharks don't want anything to do with you, they just want the fish.  When this guy, another teacher, shot the black fish at the top of the picture i was suppose to watch for sharks and drive them off if they were getting too close.  When he got to the surface one followed him up and was about 6 feet away from me.  I kicked my fins at it and it swam off, but that was pretty exciting.  I had 4 shots at groupers, and missed every single time.  It didn't do me much good to scream in anger 30 feet under water though.