It began the way that all days begin: an 8:10am departure time, a brief meeting on campus, and then off into the world of the kids. Except at 9am, instead of heading into the lecture hall to learn about Java, we headed toward the entrance of Hebrew University to board a bus.
(this is one of my favorite pictures...)
Ted laid out the ground rules which were simply: English only and stay seated while the bus was in motion. HA! The kids are loud and rambunctious. (I later found out from Max that there used to be many more field trips, and one of the main reasons that it was decreased to one is because of their behavior on the bus.)
We arrived at the caves, and were warned by this sign that we were entering at our own risk.
It turns out that someone had been wandering around the Caves at night only a few weeks before, and had fallen to his death. To combat such actions, the signs were put up by the parks and recreation folks. But it didn't dampen our spirits! Down we wandered into the caves.
The purpose of today's trip was a combination of ODT (outdoor training) and teambuilding. While the kids have been having teambuilding/leadership activities for the previous several weeks, nothing was as intense as this full day experience. My recitation, along with Alice's recitation, began with the teambuilding segment.
1. Moving together.
The first challenge was a simple one. Stand in a circle, extend one arm and an index finger, and balance a hula hoop on everyone's fingers. Then, lower the hoop in unison. This was more challenging than one might expect, but with a few minutes, we succeeded. The second challenge was to hold hands, and pass through a hoop while ending up in the same configuration in the end. Also, easy as pie.
From there, things got more challenging. The students stood around a rope circle, and had to get to an object in the middle without touching the interior of the circle. Their solution was to make a stack of tires, lay two sticks across them, and have the smallest team member (Husam of course!!!) crawl out on it.
3. The safe
The next challenge involved a "safe". The kids had to "enter the combination" of the safe by stomping on the numbers 1 through 30 in less than 60 seconds. They failed.
4. Games challenge
The kids had to solve two puzzles in 20 minutes. The first involved 9 hula hoops on the ground, with 4 people on the left facing to the right, and 4 people on the right facing to the left. Each person could move only forward, and could only move one space or two spaces by skipping over a person. They solved it in less than 10 minutes.
The second game had a large chess board, ie an 8x8 board with alternating black and white squares. There were 8 pieces, each of which functioned like a queen in chess: they could kill anything in the same row, column, or diagonal. The object of the game was to place all 8 pieces in such a way that none could be killed by the others. They failed. ;-)
The kids hopefully learned some valuable lessons about teamwork and leadership from these exercises. They do not yet have the skills of leadership, listening to each others opinions, respect, etc, and this made each of the games even more challenging to them.
(A brief aside: I'm somewhat sad about my camera situation... Leemor took it so she could take pictures of all the kids rappelling and such. But she left it on for a long time, so by the time I got it back, the battery was pretty much dead. I have a lot of pictures of people doing cool things, but not MY kids! Awwwww. But, it's still not as bad as Froy... Mustafa took his camera, and fell, and broke it. Ick.)
After the teambuilding games and a sandwich lunch, my recitation group headed up to the surface of to do some rappelling (or sneppling, as it's called in hebrew)! Here is what the hole looked like from the inside:
And from the outside:
My group suited up:
And went in. Here's Sagy (my best coder!) starting his descent.
Tali wouldn't go, despite my pleading.... and my threats to throw her in without a rope if she wouldn't go with one. Pfft!
These isn't one of the kids from my recitation, but here's what it looks like during the descent, inside the cave:
Huzzah! After all of my students (minus Tali) had descended, I too took the plunge. It was friggin SCARY!!! Afterwards, we went to another extreme activity called the Omega. It's basically a zipline, but you sit in a chair harness instead of having to hold on to anything. I wasn't able to see all of my kids go, but Tali did take a picture of Katia while I was gone.
And I got a picture of Ala'a, right before my camera died. ie, Right before I jumped!
When I jumped, my kids wanted me to say something funny. So I did. In fact, I thrusted myself forward and yelled out "Something Funny!!!" as a flew through the air. After we'd all ridden the Omega, and taken a group picture which will supposedly be posted on Facebook, we headed back down to the cave to try some rope climbing.
Omri looking cute while climbing
Ted, showing off his agility, as always
On the ride back to Hebrew University, Liel and I listened to some of the greatest songs of all time... like BACKSTREET BOYS SONGS! Harhar. After some ice cream and soccer at the campus, the kids headed home, and we had our end of day meeting. Oddly enough, we ran into Omri again while on the grassy area outside of Sprinzak. ::shrug::
Back at the house, while sitting on the couch we moved outside to the stoop, we decided to go to PizzaMeter in the German quarter. It is a pizza place that sells pizza by the meter, if that wasn't too obvious from the title! Unfortunately, it turned out that it was recently closed, so we settled on Pizza Sababa instead.
Bo is serious about this corn pizza
Quote of the Day: "I've got my green camo shirt, and my black pants to blend in with the nighttime." [crazy hand motion, crazy hand motion] -Theodore
Next Post: That Time I Had My Final Recitation :-(
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