Stick To Your Plan

I am the Academic Decathlon coach at Wheeler. (My assistant coach and I are competing to see who the biggest nerd is, which just proves that this is the right job for us to be doing.) This year our topic is The French Revolution, so this weekend I took the team to Boston to the Museum of Fine Arts to see some of the 18th century French paintings and just to go over Art fundamentals in general. It all started out well at Providence Station that morning and our train ride there was very uneventful. We arrived in Boston and had lunch at Betty's Wok and Café, which is like a 50's anglo diner but that serves Chinese/Hispanic food. We had hoped for a French restaurant, but we were on the wrong side of town. We visited the museum and saw some beautiful artwork and sculpture.

It was all working out to be a great trip. However, Evie (my assistant coach) and I noticed that on the metro map there was a closer train station than the one we had planned on using to get back. So, when we were done at the museum, we asked the museum guide how to get to the closer train station. Well, he sent us in the OPPOSITE direction from the station. I knew we were lost when we started wandering around the Wentworth Institute of Technology. So we started back towards the museum and asked some people on the street how to get to Ruggles Station. Do you know every single person gave us different directions? Oh, yes, and right about now it started snowing. Finally we found a street map and located the general vicinity of the station. At this point we were close to missing our train and had to make a mad dash across the campus of Northeastern to finally find the right road. I am sure we looked like some kind of weird running team with backpacks. But find it we did! Unfortunately we arrived at the train station seven minutes after the train had already left. We had an hour and a half before the next train so we hung out in the Northeastern student center and drank hot chocolate and had some dinner/snacks. We DID make the next train and the evening ended well. The team is mostly boys this year and they are extremely chill so it actually made things more fun to have time to sit around and chat.

Anyway, the moral of the story is stick with your plan because trying to make things faster doesn't always make things faster and sometimes makes things much slower! Here is a picture of everyone at Betty's before we changed from the Wheeler Academic Decathlon team to the Wheeler Night-time Track Team:

The novel the kids are reading for the competition is Tale of Two Cities and after our experience we decided that our motto for the year should be:

"It was mostly the worst of times."

Do I have a fun job or what?