What a blast to watch the space shuttle Endeavour fly by on its farewell tour up on the Middle School deck with grades 2-8. After a very long wait, just after I talked to the kids about how sometimes we wait and are rewarded, and sometimes we wait and are disappointed (never waste a teaching moment, right?), and had dismissed one class to return to the classroom, a teacher pointed to the hills behind me and shouted "There it is!" And the kids went crazy with cheering and shouting.
The shuttle looks small in this picture, but to us on the ground it was astonishingly big - more like the second photo below.
It was a moment, and experience, that that connected us together deeply in a manner that I was not expecting - the shared tension of the long wait, the disappointment of thinking we wouldn't see it, and then victory snatched from the jaws of defeat created a raw, precious energy and excitement for students and teachers alike.
In this shot taken from the roof of the BUSD headquarters down the street, you can see TBS and the crowd of students and teachers cheering the fly-by.
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