New school and swimming club

I have 12 days left to vis­it. At first it seemed that there was a lot of time ahead, but with one month left, the days ran at light­ning speed. My grand­son start­ed school on August 5^th. His par­ents trans­ferred him to anoth­er Basis school, which opened clos­est to the place where they live.

Getting to know the school.

It’s not far by local stan­dards, but in gen­er­al, dad takes him by car for 25 – 30 min­utes. The school is very small, with chil­dren from Kinder­gar­den to fourth grade. On August 3, they all went to school togeth­er to meet the teach­ers, and brought school sup­plies, every­thing from erasers to plas­tic bags. They are giv­en by mail a list of what to bring for each sub­ject, this is all hand­ed over to the school, and then in each class they are giv­en paper, pen­cils, etc. They bought every­thing on the list for $200. Loaded the entire trunk (no exaggeration).

At school we were shown all the class­rooms, each teacher told about them­selves. There was not enough seat­ing in one of the class­es, as there were many par­ents, and the chil­dren all plopped down on the floor in front of the black­board and sat there. Teach­ers, in my Russ­ian opin­ion, have such a strange man­ner of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, like between friends. There is no dis­tance between the teacher and stu­dents, as in our school. For exam­ple, a teacher who taught with her grand­son at a pre­vi­ous school entered the class­room, saw him, rushed to him — “Hi, high five!” Knocked hand in hand…

And so the school began. Here, hol­i­days begin and end in dif­fer­ent states at dif­fer­ent times, even in the same city, class­es have already begun in some schools, while oth­ers have not yet.

Now I stay at home, alone and go to the pool in the morn­ing myself.

Swim team.

The grand­son went to school on August 5, and already on August 11, dur­ing recess, col­lid­ed with a girl rid­ing a swing and got a slight con­cus­sion. It lat­er turned out that it was light, but at first, when he fell and lost con­scious­ness, and when his par­ents called from school and they took him to an ambu­lance, it didn’t seem to us at all that it was light span>. In the ambu­lance, he imme­di­ate­ly under­went a tomog­ra­phy of the head, they said that there was no hem­or­rhage, and he need­ed to be observed for 24 hours, if he did not feel sick, then he could go to school.

In the ER, he imme­di­ate­ly under­went a tomog­ra­phy of the head, they said that there was no hemorrhage …

We decid­ed to let him recov­er and not dri­ve him until the end of the week. Good thing he was ful­ly recov­ered by Sat­ur­day. And on Sat­ur­day, August 15, a selec­tion was sched­uled for the morn­ing of a new swim­ming club, a mem­ber of USA Swim­ming. This club trains in a swim­ming pool that is just min­utes from the school and it is much bet­ter than where it used to go.

For this selec­tion, the grand­son was pre-reg­is­tered sev­er­al weeks in advance. We arrived at the pool in the morn­ing and did not know how this selec­tion would take place. There were about 50 chil­dren of dif­fer­ent ages. Every­one was giv­en swim­ming caps, on which their names were writ­ten and dis­trib­uted to 4 peo­ple per lane, and the lanes were dis­trib­uted accord­ing to the age of the chil­dren. Sev­er­al coach­es walked along the sides and did a full 45 minute work­out with them, gave them the task to swim one style, then anoth­er. Then every­one was told good job and promised to send the results of the selec­tion by e‑mail. On the same day, a mes­sage came that the grand­son was accept­ed in the swim team.