In early October, the week after Duke, where the VAs' top Congressional player obtains a ToC bid as the highlight of the VAs at that tournament by finishing fifth, Ena checks in with Flo during the debate team practice, moved to Monday for this week.
"Francisco, you could have broken at Duke; however, it appears that you perform very well only in international topics" Flo comments on Francisco's performance at Duke. "You should do well to ask for help about domestic topics to your Congressional teammates"
"Broken? What is the meaning of this?" Ena asks upon arriving at the room used both for her French courses and the debate team practices.
"Francisco got ones on international topics, but fives on domestic topics and hence didn't make it to the semifinals" Flo explains to a confused Ena, who knows nothing about how speech (including but not limited to, extemp) and Congress rounds are scored. "Essentially, the higher the number, the worse the player's performance in a round"
"Don't forget the homecoming game!" Ena adds to the pair, while Steven is busy tending to the other players.
However, I don't think I would be interested in going to the math games. And not the least because Anastasia is actually a mathlete as well as a quiz bowler, Francisco struggles to keep quiet about mathletics.
"Please, let me go to the homecoming game!" Francisco pleads with Flo.
"I'll even pay for Francisco's student section ticket out of the exchange programming budget!" Ena adds to this series of pleas.
"I guess, I didn't attend a football game in person since I started teaching here" Flo sighs, while looking at the VAs' football calendar. Iowa.
"At home, people often talked about life in an American high school to revolve around football. But the rigors of the debate team, and of school, prevented me from going to the games" Francisco confides in both teachers.
Ciboire, football. The pandemic ruined the school's athletics, and I attended a grand total of one Rouge et Or football game at Telus Stadium, albeit a playoff one. Pre-pandemic, I always heard about how such-and-such school would be all too willing to sacrifice academics and treat football as king, Flo's recollections of football seems to distract her from the session, even as Ena leaves the room to buy a student ticket for the Iowa game on Francisco's behalf. Se starts feeling a little dizzy...
"Something's not right, I might need to go out for a bit. LD and PF players, please watch the topic analysis video for the next two months' topic and then you will do your research" Flo gives her instructions for what she plans on doing when she is out to take a cup of coffee.
"Yes, coach" both LD players nod when Flo leaves the room.
She then takes a cup of coffee, catches up on the current VA football season on her cell phone and realizes that she ought to buy a ticket, too, if she wants to fulfill her promise to her extemper. Yet, she happens to cross paths with Ena after she brews her cup of coffee:
"I wonder if you have any experience of student exchanges in any capacity" Flo asks Ena about this aspect prior to returning to the training session.
"I spent a year on exchange in Scotland" Ena then reveals this information to her.
"Now I understand why you wanted to take up this responsibility: you went on exchange yourself!"
Flo comes back to the debate practice with a cup of coffee on hand, with Ena in tow. Upon return, she leaves the PF and LD players to their own devices since they must start preparing for a new topic, and research it. Meanwhile, Ena hands over Francisco's ticket to the Iowa game to him and then leaves the room.
She then moves over to Tania, the orat player, going over the piece and the judgments from Duke. One of these judgments makes her want to scream.
"Tabarnak!" Florence screams. "As much as I'm willing to acknowledge that, in orat, as well as in interp, you're at the mercy of your piece, and how judges perceive a specific theme in a piece, one of the judgments is about... how you cover the dangers of medical inaccuracies in sex ed?" Flo gasps upon reading that judgment from Duke. "And your piece is about the importance of medically accurate sex ed?"
They then go over the piece, hoping to reword the passages relative to the dangers of medical inaccuracies in sex ed, so long as they don't exceed the limit of one hundred fifty directly quoted words.
Yet she's remembered of a dictation she gave last year in her French courses in doing so. I only covered STI prevention; she covered other topics, both male and female. Even so, she is remembered about how orat is more about delivery than content.
"You were victim of a biased judge, most likely, and unfortunately, you can't always avoid biased judging" Flo sighs.
At the end of the practice, she goes to the athletic department office to buy her own ticket for the Iowa game.
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Come game day, on Friday night, several teachers who wouldn't otherwise attend football games came out precisely because it's, well, homecoming. Like Warren, who comes because Anastasia, one of his players, was also given a student section ticket by Ena.
But then comes Marianne and her family to the Jerry Simmons Stadium, a few minutes before kickoff. Sonny and Carmen both get to the student section and get seated next to other students, thanks to them being children of school staff.
"The stadium is not the best maintained in the world, but it sure beats the stadium of my old workplace" Marianne comments on the facility's condition.
"Last major work on it took place in my graduation year" Flo comments on Marianne, having overheard her boss. "I guess your old workplace just lacked the budget to even maintain, well, facilities"
I heard tales from all over the country, from Texas to Ohio and New Jersey, of school administrators who neglected maintenance of their schools' non-athletic facilities, and in the more extreme cases, their academics, in favor of renovations to their football fields, locker rooms, training equipment and all that. Meanwhile, VA football appears to be one of the most underfunded teams in LHSAA 3A football. At the same time, Wattpad High only had rusting grandstands, moldy bathrooms and field house for a football stadium. When I started out here, I knew it was one of those few districts that had its priorities straight, and I inherited one of the best schools in southwest Louisiana, Marianne reflects on the topic of athletic facilities as well as another motivation of what drove her to work at VA.
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Marianne is in the press box, announcing the homecoming game, all the while Flo is seated next to Steven.
"The main reason why I don't usually go to football games much is that I feel like it's dangerous for nothing. I feel like football is part of the educational erosion I saw elsewhere" Flo laments about it.
"I never understood the obsession of the South for high school football until I started teaching in the early stages of the pandemic" Steven explains to her. "Football might bring communities together, but it was foreign to me all the way through undergrad"
"If it was foreign to you up to this point, then where did you go to high school?"
"Somewhere in the Northeast I would say"
But this discussion is cut short when the game proper starts and the locals intently watch the first down. However, all the two foreign exchange students can manage to make out is two lines of players smashing each other, with the team possessing the ball trying to advance it by any means necessary.
Then, on the second down, the VAs, seeing that, on the first pass, they failed to execute a running play, perhaps the passing play would be a better option. However, these things make questions pop in the exchange students' minds.
"Why is it that our own decides to try passing the ball around, rather than running with it as they tried last time?" Anastasia asks her fellow students.
"In general, the decision of pass vs rush often comes down to how the offense matches up against the opposing defense. Iowa's defense seems to be more focused on defending against the rush" Marissa explains to her quiz bowl teammate.
The quarterback then passes the ball to the wide receiver to his left, who rushes in while the corresponding cornerback moves into position to attempt an interception. The wide receiver manages to catch the ball with a split-second to spare, twenty-seven yards away from the opposing goal line.
Then Marissa goes on to explain to Anastasia what does each position do, on both sides of the ball. Doing so took several downs, but neither side scored anything by the time Marissa is done explaining the basics of each position, downs and pass vs rush.
Francisco, on the other hand, seems to have learned everything he knew about football from more or less dated TV shows. When the opposing free safety tackles the VAs' wide receiver, the crowd gasps.
And the opposing free safety tries to run with the ball, only to be tackled by the tight end. This entire sequence might have set the VAs back about twenty yards, but the forced fumble makes the crowd howl.
"Is it always like this here?" Anastasia asks her quiz bowl teammate.
"In what sense?" Marissa asks.
"In that school life tended to revolve around high school football during the football season"
"Here, since football hasn't been very good in years, the one game everyone wants to attend is the homecoming game. Honestly, it would depend on whether you are in an urban or rural area. In urban areas, people don't tend to get behind their high school football team as much as in rural areas"
At the end of the first quarter, the game is tied 0-0. By this point, Flo asks a question for Steven, since there was nothing going on in-game:
"I might be wondering how you even came to teach here" Flo asks Steven, believing that most people who want to teach in public schools come from in-state.
"I wonder if you're familiar with Teach for America..." Steven asks another question back.
"No?" Flo's face turns red. "Should I?"
"TFA often tends to recruit young graduates from higher-tier universities and then teach in low-income regions for two years. I started teaching through it, and I fell in love with south Louisiana during my two years teaching French at Livonia, in Pointe-Coupée Parish. Then I started teaching at VA because I had the impression Livonia didn't have their priorities straight back then"
I can see it from there: Steven was himself a kid who needed significant financial aid to attend Trinity, and so he wants to help other low-income kids go to college without them incurring more debt than absolutely necessary, Flo starts to think of what kind of past Steven might have had, and what led him to teach French at VA.
So while, in the first quarter, Iowa was kept scoreless, in the second quarter, it's Iowa's turn to try going for the passing play when their attempts at rushing were rebuffed. The VAs' free safety leaps into the air in an attempt to catch the pass made to the Iowa wide receiver, and the cornerback assigned to cover said WR seems to be fighting with the free safety over who will get to intercept the pass. In the end, the opposing wide receiver gets hit when the ball gets caught and whoever caught the ball crashes down to earth. The crowd, mostly wearing green and purple, goes crazy when the play ends.
"Venomous! Agendas! Venomous! Agendas! Venomous! Agendas!" the crowd keeps howling for a bit until play resumes.
With the VAs back on the offense, and the game still 0-0, they feel confident they can play the passing game starting from the first down. As much as the opposing cornerbacks and strong safety could try to intercept the VAs' wide receiver, they always seem to fall short. Once again, the crowd cheers on the VAs as the wide receiver slaloms on the field in an attempt to evade the opposing defensive players.
Said WR feels the heat when the opposing defensive players try to close in on him, free safety, cornerback, to name a few. The crowd gets louder at every yard he runs. As the opposing free safety attempts to steal the ball from him by the goal line... the FS' last-ditch attempt to prevent the WR from crossing it fails and...
"TOUCHDOWN!" Marianne announces over the stadium's PA system. "Venomous Agendas six, Yellowjackets nothing"
Then comes the conversion, where the VAs' placekicker is put into position in an attempt to kick the ball between the goal posts, as with a field goal. The score is then 7-0 once the sequence ends.
As play resumes at center field, Iowa spends three downs failing to advance a single yard. On the fourth down, frustrated by their failures to advance, the Yellowjackets attempt a field goal. Which the VAs' free safety then attempts to block, but the ball is coming in too high for the SS to block the field goal attempt. Even when its kicker gets booed all over the stadium, Iowa scores three points, but the VAs are still in the lead, 7-3.
"How do organized sports work at home?" a Congressional player asks Francisco.
"You have intra-mural sports, run by the school, and you have clubs, outside the school system" Francisco answers his teammate's question.
That Congressional player then realizes that such strong emphasis on high school sports he lived his entire life makes the American school system an outlier, or at least life in rural regions. As for the rest of the game, it seemed to be very defense-minded, and no further points are scored on either side.
At the end of the game, which the VAs win 7-3, it seemed to be a balm on their football woes, since they haven't won a single district game, and won only one out-of-district game this season, against South Beauregard. About three weeks ago.
Going 2-5 at this point of the season means we're out of playoff contention in football, one of the football player still feels relief despite their bad season.
Yet, after the game ends, Francisco goes to Flo and asks questions about how football players perform academically. After all, often outsiders seem to think academic favors are handed out to footballers, at least when players are at risk of failing. Good; I think football players are often unfairly stereotyped. I'm happy Francisco is asking this because the other kids I deal in don't question this, presumably because they know at least one football player personally, Flo starts to think of his experience here, as a VA on exchange.
"Flo, I wonder why is it that football players are stereotyped as dumb" Francisco asks him.
"Personally, I think it's not accurate, but I believe it comes from how the rigors from playing football interfere with studying. There are a couple of football players who do well academically, and certainly a VA footballer or two, but I can't give any names"
Oh boy, I can name several examples of football players who can take APs just fine, both from my own time as a VA student and on the current roster. I have a handful of footballers in my French classes, and a few of them will go on to take AP French, that question from Francisco gives her pause.
"Also, you must realize that we operate on no-pass, no-play. So that any athlete, in any sport, must pass all courses, and also maintain a C average to be able to play" Flo comments on the academic requirements of playing inter-scholastic sports.
"You must also realize that how hard getting that C average is, will vary wildly from a school to another even in this region alone" Steven makes a follow-up comment, and then toots VA's horn. "While I believe you got lucky to go here on exchange, I think you would be unsatisfied academically almost anywhere else in southwest Louisiana"