The Science of Tennis

Three weeks of summer have already flown by- a week of camp, a week of pure blissful nothingness, and a week of inservice. This week I'm subbing an hour and a half per day for a summer school teacher at $22/hour. It seems like a simple enough job, but here's the catch. It's HIGH SCHOOL SCIENCE! First things first, you'll remember from previous posts (and also the fact that both of you who read my blog are dear friends) that I'm an elementary school teacher. Not a high school science teacher. There's a reason for that. I was in honors biology and chemistry my first two years of high school. Biology was okay. Good enough to keep me in honors for the next year anyway (which is a completely different story than my seventh grade math class, but that's a different post.) Chemistry, however, was a different story. Let's just say that the teacher showed great mercy by not making me take the class over again. After that terrible experience with elements and whatnot, I opted out of physics, which is the class most juniors take. Actually, I felt that science in general was unnecessary for my education, but my degree plan disagreed. Thus, I found myself in Aquatic Science. All we did for the year was keep a fish tank and watch "The Abyss." We had this really cool big tank with a really expensive fish, some kind of eel, and some other little fishies in it. Due to the fact that we usually forgot to feed our fish, the expensive one died and we got in big trouble. Unfortunately, the eel survived. I hated that thing. Anyway, all this is just to say that these high school kids probably know alot more about high school science than I do. Hopefully they'll just be doing worksheets or something.


In other news, I am now a tennis star. Kind of. I will be in a couple months, anyway. I started playing this week, and I LOVE it! I'll love it alot more once I'm good at it, but considering I generally hate doing anything I'm not good at, I think it's a good sign that I'm liking this tennis thing. The reason I started playing is because I have several friends that play, and my grandpa also plays, so I figured it would be a good skill to have. Also, if I'm playing tennis with grandpa, he might quit asking me to play golf. When I was younger, he even went so far as to buy me my own set of clubs. Did I ever take them out of the bag? No. Good thing my brother is a golfing boy. To this day, my grandpa still says, "Jennifer, we'll make an athlete out of you yet." I told him that this will be his best chance to do it. He told me we could play as much as I want. He also gave me a racket.

(Note: my grandpa loves me more than anything else in the world--seriously--and he has always been proud of me and my many musical and academic successes. Just ask anyone he knows. They'll tell you all about how sick they are of hearing about me. However, he was a coach for many years and has never given up the dream of me being athletic. Yeah, I know...I'm laughing too.)