All I Wants To Do Is Play Basketball

When I filled in for daughter Missy last year to teach the last 8 1/2 weeks of her school year one of my students was a young man whose name is Darrell - pronounced Da Rell.  I had Darrell for Economics, World History and Western Expansion.  Darrell would either dress in Bloomingdale sweats or those large low hanging jeans that showed off his nice plaid undershorts and which needed to be manually raised every time he stood up to sharpen his pencil, which was about 10 times a class.  One time I remarked to Darrell that we had a real cool invention when I was his age.  "We called them suspenders.  Saves a lot of work."  Perhaps matching plaid would be nice.

Darrell would normally arrive a little late for each class, put his head on his desk as long as he could, unless something woke him and his pencil needed sharpening, and then asked me if he could leave a little early to do something like talk to his coach.  I unexpectedly woke him one time in Western Expansion when I put in a Ken Burns DVD number 5 and the alert students informed me that they had already viewed number 5.  "What are we going to do now Mr. LaBarge" they asked.  "Well, this is what Mrs. Lam had scheduled for today, let me think about it for a minute."  Apparently Darrell was not actually sleeping because he picks his head off the desk and says loudly, "Man, we got nothing to do today!"

About four weeks before school was to let out for the summer a number of students became aware that they actually needed to hand in assignments and raise their grades to a level that would allow them to graduate, not repeat classes or avoid attending remedial summer school.  This prompted Darrell to ask me what he needed to do to raise his grades in my classes above the fail level.  I showed him on the computer all the missing assignments and said that if he did the work and scored well enough that he could easily pass each class.  I would give him a few at a time and if he completed those he would get some more.  Looking ruefully Darrell told me "All I wants to do is play basketball".  Well, for 99.9 per cent something it doesn't really work that way.  Darrell was actually quite bright, turned in an amazing amount of work in a short time and passed all his classes.

I thought of Darrell when I did a road test today for Jarvyn.  He was from Grand Rapids, did basketball at East Kentwood and then Union High School, played point guard for a very good AAU team and went to college at Mississippi for basketball.  His dad had played basketball at Purdue.  Jarvyn told me he was back in Grand Rapids because of family reasons and was going to transfer to play basketball at Western Michigan.

"Isn't it like 110 degrees everyday in Mississippi?" I asked.  "You get use to it.  I use to leave my dorm every night at about 7 and play basketball until 3 in the morning."

 "Are you already accepted at Western?"  "I will be as soon as I pass my ACT." 

"You got into Mississippi without an ACT score?"  "Didn't need it.  They had me do a special entrance test."

 "So you didn't do an ACT?"  "I did.  But it was held in an auditorium and I got really bored so I spent the whole time just doodling.  I'm going to do it again because my dad says I should at least be able to get a 25."

Which reminds me.  All I really wants to do is eat about 25 Hostess Cupcakes and blog.