Invasion of the Cool Kids

So on the bus today, I got on and it was half-full of the red-shirted high school kids I talked about earlier.  I guess word is spreading to get on the bus and ride it a bit.  I am tired today, I suppose still not caught up from the weekend (I may never get out of the habit of waking up early in the mornings.  After I graduated and started teaching, I started my Master's which included Saturday classes almost every Saturday for a year at 8:00.  I'll never forgive myself for this...it seems i'll never be able to sleep past 9am latest again!), so I was in no mood for happy children that were not my students.  Side note: I seem more than willing here to treat kids differently than I do at home.  I'm much more lenient here, which is a cultural change.  However, I've always wanted to be a bit more lenient and blamed it on "that's not my teaching style."  I suppose maybe it can be my teaching style.  It's also probably interesting that I'm saying this because I often feel at Lockeland that I've done nothing but get more and more lenient each year.  I'm a pushover these days!

Anyway, we got to the stop where the red-shirts' school is and the bus was immediately sardine-packed.  Literally every seat was taken and even the standers were cramped.  Not only that...

I was near the back.  I usually sit in the same area on the bus: front-ish, left side.  The afternoon bus is so crowded, though, that I can't see out the windows.  I'm trying to get myself acclimated to downtown from the bus because I think Thursday, on our planning day, I may get off downtown and scope it out.  The area is confusing and the bus route even more so.  But two weeks after arrival, I'm ready to conquer!

There was a large crowd of boys that reminded me of the GHS Dawg Pound days.  There were lots of prepared sounds.  I remember in high school, at the basketball days, Jamaal Allen got the Dawg Pound started and our team was decent.  We had so many student cheers that didn't require the cheerleaders.  Everything the players did was a cue.  If our team did something good, we had motions or cheers or something.  If the other team did something, we also had cues.  The one I remembered most today was when a player from the other team was taken out of the game.  We would all chant "ahhhhhhhhhhhhh" until he got to the bench and then "sit down."  I'm sure that was poor form. I'm more sure I had to take my cue from the crowd instead of the actual event on the court.  This also may have been a typical student section cheer.  What do I know.  All I know is, on the bus today, every traffic light meant one cheer, every speed bump another, and every stop to let passengers on and off was yet another.  It was annoying as all get out!  

There were so many and it was so loud, I wondered if they had put out an announcement of which bus to catch.  Most days, a big group of them rides my bud until Plaza Forum, the mall near my house.  There were at least double today, but luckily, they got off early.  There must've been something special downtown.

I can't decide if I want to hang at school for an extra thirty minutes and get some things done while avoiding the high school crowd, or if I want to get on home and avoid the working lunch crowd.