Living in Latvia it's pretty regular and normal to meet people who are "famous" on the scale of living in such a small country. We always enjoy reading the tabloids while we're waiting in line at the grocery store because it's almost guaranteed there will be an article about at least one person that we know personally and we can have a good chuckle about it - usually it's one of Latvia's top musicians or sometimes someone I know from working in an international school. But yesterday I had an opportunity that is cool pretty much on the world scale.
Our final unit of the year at school called "I Feel Good" is an inquiry into choices we make each day which have an impact on our own well-being - diet and nutrition, exercise, balancing work and rest, etc. So yesterday we set out to interview a professional athete about the choices he makes each day to be able to feel his best and perform at his best. We took a field trip to the BMX track in Valmiera and interviewed the gold medalist from last year's Olympic games in Beijing.
Let me put it in perspective for you with some facts my class and I learned before the trip. Latvia has been participating in the Olympics since 1924 (Latvia was only six years old as a country at this time, a child). Since that time Latvia has come home with two gold medals, both since it's second independence after the fall of the Soviet Union. Of course that is a huge deal when you are talking about a country of just two million people. And in the first year that BMX became an official Olympic sport, it was a Latvian who took the gold. That's impressive not only on our small scale, but he is the best at what he does in the world. It's entirely possible that I was more excited than the kids on this day.
So the very coolest thing is how nice and down to earth both Maris the medalist and his coach Ivo were toward us. One of my students even showed appreciation about this because she said, "Mrs. Diana, I was a little worried and I thought he might be like the other Latvian men with such short hair [a buzz cut] and he would be not so nice, but he was soooooo nice to us and shared so many great things with us!"
We learned that he also gets so nervous before a race and he told the children how he deals with his nerves by visualizing the last time he did really well in a race and tries to get ready to repeat that. We learned that he has broken both collar bones and several ribs and then got a tattoo of the Chinese symbol for health on his arm, and (knock on wood!) hasn't had any big injuries since then. (I'm sharing all the fun facts we learned, can you tell I'm excited??) And we learned that when his father first brought him to the BMX track at the age of five he cried and cried because he was so scared and it took five visits before he was brave enough to get on a bike. This was the best thing for my class to hear, because after that they all overcame a bit of fear, took a risk and tried their hand on a BMX bike!
I can't post the lovely picture of all of us together with Maris, nor can a post the one where we are sitting around the picnic tables interviewing him and my students look so studious diligently taking notes. But I can post the pictures I made my students take of their goofy teacher who was so excited.... :)
Me sitting on the really real bike that he rode in the Olympics!
Then the kids said, "Mrs. Diana, you have to pretend like you just won the gold medal!"
And finally, here I am holding the really real gold medal! More interesting facts about the medal - the medal is not solid gold, the front is gold plated and the back of the medal is always designed by the hosting country, so this particular medal has a Chinese stone on the back. So there.....and my kids said I get the gold medal in teaching! :)
Saturday, May 23, 2009
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3 comments:
Sounds like a very cool field trip and a fun day! You look pretty geeked out! :)
I really was!! :)
You're funny. :) Glad you enjoyed yourself so much!
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