We drive to Branson a few times, each year, to visit Silver Dollar City. Silver Dollar City is probably one of the best themed parks in existence, owing most of its theme to regional and state history and specifically to the 1880s.  Any real historian understands that this history is romanticized its telling in a theme park, but sometimes I prefer romanticized version.

I enjoy the "City" due to its emphasis on citizenship and family, as well.  If one takes one's time, one will notice this emphasis in the details around the park.  After a lifetime of visiting, I can always find at least one thing I have not noticed before.

This year's addition replaced the old 1980s kid area called Geyser Gulch. The new addition has most of the same features, but places them in the better setting of a "fireman's fair".  With "Fire Station No. 3" also comes some new rides to the park, as well as some old favorites from the past and from the nearby defunct Celebration City.  All have been completely refurbished and color-coded to the area.  It's exponentially better than the mauves, pinks, and blues that never belonged there in the first place, and it really improves the shoreline at Lake Silver.

Some interesting notes about the theming of Silver Dollar City follow.  Did you know these?

• Patrons used to park in the main square:  The shops there included Man's Land, craft-souvenirs, and refreshments, built originally to appease visitors waiting for a tour of the sole attraction of Marvel Cave.
• The first theme park ride, outside of regular sources of transportation, was called The Flooded Mine.  Mining continued the theme of Marvel Cave as its history includes the mining of marble and bat guano.
• Roller Coasters ThunderaTioN and Powder Keg also refer to area mining.  Powder Keg is all about the mining of bat guano and its part in making black powder.  Outside the ride, if you're paying attention, you will find a tower.  A look inside will reveal the process for making the lead balls propelled from shotguns.  Hot lead was carried to the top of the tower and dropped.  As it plummeted toward a tank of water at the bottom, the lead formed a sphere and solidified as it cooled.  ThunderaTioN is more of a traditional runaway mine coaster, where riders shoot past a mining camp.  Pay attention to the signage for the Marble Cave Company.
• Another classic ride, Fire in the Hole, carries on the theme of vigilante characters that plagued the area in the 1800s.  These men met on treeless hills called bald knobs, and thus the group was called Bald Knobbers.
• The Bald Knobbers are said to have been responsible for the burning of the town of Marmaros, which supposedly was located on the current site of the main square at Silver Dollar City.  Fire in the Hole tells this story well.
• The taffy shop at the front of the park is called Phoebe Snapp's.  Phoebe Snapp was the real-life daughter of a man killed by the Bald Knobbers.
• During the regular season, the Frisco Train is robbed by Ralph and Alfie Bolin.  It is said there was nothing good about Alf Bolin, who was a real person.  When Bolin was stabbed to death, people danced and celebrated in the streets.  During Alf Bolin Days, people renew the celebration with a festival in nearby Forsyth, Missouri.  Thankfully, the fellow in the Silver Dollar City hold-up is slightly more mild-mannered, providing a perfect example of romanticized history.
• American Plunge, the third of the staple classic rides, is a traditional log flume ride, recounting logging efforts where logs are floated down the river.  The current ride still follows some of the original channels of its predecessor, The Jim Owens Float Trip, in which riders floated leisurely through scenes depicting the White River.
• Other water rides came later.  Current offerings include The Lost River of the Ozarks.  This attraction takes its name from a real waterway that's located beneath the City in Marvel Cave.  The theme of this raging river, inner tube ride was better depicted in its earlier days.  Riders are supposed to be in search of the Fountain of Youth along with some of the early European explorers to the area.
• Lost River replaced an attraction that many old timers still lament - Rube Dugan's Diving Bell, which harkens once again to a fictitious time line in which two miners competed to extract silver from the lake.  This simulator ride was decades ahead of its time.  When originally offered to Disney, Disney said it couldn't be done.  Silver Dollar City took a chance at brought it to the park.  Riders would enter a newly engineered "diving bell" theater, when none other than actor Burl Ives could be heard interacting with his nephew, portrayed by a live actor who operated the bell.  The whole theater moved and creaked as it was "navigated" through the murky waters of Lake Silver, leaking terribly and threatening to destine riders to a torturous demise on the lake bottom.
• Tom and Huck's Riverblast is the latest of the water ride expansions.  While Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are not characters from the region, they are the creations of Mark Twain, a favorite Missouri author.
• The most modern area additions - sadly - are less about the original theme of Silver Dollar City.  The Grand Exposition takes patrons to a traveling fair, and feels more like something from The Music Man than from 1800s Ozarks.  The rides here don't fit with the rest of the City, which may be why they are somewhat separated from the core park.
• In the Wilson's Farm area, you can ride the Giant Swing and Outlaw Run.  While these are two of the most fun rides for thrill seekers, their themes are somewhat generic.
• In Fireman's Landing, there are rides for smaller children, much as there are in The Grand Exposition, but again, they are a stretch to the theme and things in the area appear more plastic.
• It is sad to see the specific theme of the park being compromised of late.  There are even rumors that the classic Flooded Mine may be removed in the next two years to make way for more "progress".  We're hopeful that nostalgia will win in this idea.
• Silver Dollar City is also known for family-friendly music and comedy shows.  The Courthouse Theater was renamed The Riverfront Playhouse, several years ago.  Some of the best comedy shows were located in this venue.  I remember seeing the courthouse show when I was a kid.  In this show a character was sentenced to the electric chair.  My favorite of the shows was called Hatfield's Haint, in which characters searched for ghosts in a haunted house.  The last comedy show here was Timothy Turnbuckle's Time Machine, which selected a character embedded in the audience and took him back to the 1800s.
• The greatest productions were performed in the Opera House.  We've enjoyed mini-Broadway-styled musical presentations based on Mississippi River exploration, the Civil War, and Westward Expansion.  Nowadays, we miss these shows, settling for repeats of Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol only at Christmas time.  This is the best of the shows and never gets old.  In addition, a Cecil Floyd/Joplin High School graduate and a Webb City graduate perform in the starring roles.  David and Rachel Wallace portray Ebenezer Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present (Rachel is also the daughter of our library assistant, Mrs. Weisensee, and plays other roles of a villager and the angel statue in the cemetery.).
• Rachel and David are also pivotal in the evening show in the amphitheater at Echo Hollow.  This nightly concert is a showcase of country music.  David sings bass, has solo parts, and has speaking parts, and Rachel is the comic relief (who eventually sings a duet with the main emcee.  All of this comes after her portrayal of the saloon owner in the daytime show at the Silver Dollar Saloon.

We finally made it to the Route 66 Drive In Theater - and even though the temperature, Friday night, was in the 80s, we stayed quite comfortable.  The stars and the half moon shone brightly in the clear sky, and fireflies twinkled in the peripheral while a steady, light breeze scraped through the nearby trees and fields.

Thankfully, we got in line early enough to get in at all.  The place was packed with cars, pickups, vans, and SUVs from all over the area.  Surprisingly, this is a very well-kept facility.  The  thick grass lawn in front of the ticket booth and behind the screen is trimmed, along with long rows of green bushes.  Just under the screen sits a beautifully nostalgic playground, just like the quintessential drive-ins of a bygone era.  Even the restrooms and snack bar are gloriously stereotypical.

At some point, I will tell my class about Mr. Kennedy, a girls' basketball coach whose class I was privileged to be in when I was in high school. No, I was not "identifying" differently back then, thank you very much; Dan Kennedy also taught Honors English and Creative Writing classes, and if you know me at all, you know I took all of those classes I could.

As a side note, it was in Mr. Kennedy's class that I first heard that President Reagan had been shot.

Interestingly, Mr. Kennedy was voted by students to be the "Easiest Teacher"; he is listed as such on one page of my yearbook.  Of course, on the facing page, he is also listed as the "Hardest Teacher".  How does that happen, you may wonder.  I wondered the same thing.

The answer did not come to me until I became a teacher.  You see, Mr. Kennedy taught - unlike most of the coaches who taught academic classes - difficult material, and his expectations were high, but at the same time, he had a way of making things easy for us.  Not only that, but every day, once the class found our seats, Mr. Kennedy would enter the room, slam the door loudly, and proclaim in a booming voice, "It's great to be alive!"  I am quite certain he remains the favorite teacher for many of my classmates.

Still, this was a wild ride.  More richly developed characters would have been nice, but the science behind the story provided enough believability that it satisfied us.  Jurassic World made us believe that velociraptors could be trained and tamed to a degree, that superdinos could be genetically-engineered, that a company would "spare no expense" to continually push the envelope to attract more and more paying customers.  On top of these things, we also loved all the nostalgic nods to the original movie.

That being said, the graphic and intense scenes warranted a PG-13 rating for this movie.  I suspect the same story could have been told, with care to only indirectly handle the more gratuitous scenes, garnering a PG rating.  And the box office would not have suffered for it.  I didn't need to see flying reptiles tossing a lady through the air, fighting over which would get to eat her.  I didn't need to see characters being bitten and swallowed to understand that was what was happening.  The director could have captured all of those same ideas with a little more creativity and discretion.

For this reason, I would not recommend Jurassic World for children under 13.  After all, that's what the rating indicates, isn't it?  I'm sure I'll meet many nine-year-olds who have seen this movie though, and I will happily discuss our opinions of the picture and where we think the next installment will take us.

There's really no reason to believe a fire in my original school (Page-Woodson in Oklahoma City) wouldn't be deliberately set.  In fact, according to this report from KWTV in Oklahoma City, firefighters fought flames in three separate classrooms.

I know we had some hot days during that first week of classes on the second floor (with no air conditioning). The heat just radiated from the old wooden floors, and the loud, electric box fans in the windows just pushed the hot air around.  I ended my days with sweaty clothes and hair, but with all the exhaustion of that job, I'm not sure any of my fifth graders actually learned from me.  Those students have no reason to believe they were ever in my class.  My picture and name never appeared in their yearbooks or on their report cards.

The only thing they might remember is that we wrote letters to one of my friends who was then serving in the war against Iraq (1990).  With perfect timing, that friend returned home and actually visited us in the classroom.  I can proudly report that within the first two weeks of my first teaching job, I received positive press (in the form of a television news report) for Oklahoma City Schools.

By the end of my short time there, I was transferred to a different location to teach second grade in another city school.  Again, the heat was stifling, and we still had to fight the sounds of traffic and box fans.

Thankfully, the fires of everyday lives do not require trained firefighters to put them out.  But fires do reveal themselves to us in the unlikeliest of times.  We can only react.  My hope is that we will keep the fires small, this year, and put them out quickly as a team.  I often talk to my students about conflict resolution.  I often observe with them that it's not always the action that gets people in trouble, but it is our reaction to the action that can either escalate matters or shrink them to extinction.  How do we avoid escalation?  How do we effectively resolve conflict? It is something we all should work on as our world changes around us.  Thankfully, the fires at Page-Woodson are out, and minimal damage was done, but even with small fires damage is inflicted that will forever scar the historic building.

Just in time for the new school year, ClassDojo releases their "Groups" feature, today. With this long-awaited feature, teachers can now award team points for cooperative groups, project teams, or table groups.  And it's just as easy to use as ever.  One of the most exciting aspects of the new feature is that a student may be assigned to multiple groups.  If I want to have various reading groups, math groups, performing groups - or whatever - I can assign positive or negative points to those groups and award them.  I can also click on a group and award points to a specific member of the group (Maybe a student is displaying especially high levels of leadership.).  This is the type of flexibility and simplicity that keeps ClassDojo at the top of my technology list.

I continue to be impressed with the flexibility of ClassDojo, but I have to be just as impressed with the way the ClassDojo team seeks involvement and suggestions from the people who use their product.  As a ClassDojo mentor, I get to review new features and provide feedback about their usability.  Seeing this feature coming ahead of time has really piqued my interest and confirms that the team is listening to their users for ways to improve the product.  The platform is about to get a couple of other big additions, as well, while at all times maintaining its flexibility and simplicity.  If you are a teacher who needs to improve communication with parents, if you need to track behaviors, or if you want to positively encourage students, ClassDojo is definitely worth your consideration. And if you would like some help with the program, please feel free to contact me.

There is a place in Norman, Oklahoma, where many of the exhibits are prehistoric.  It is called the Sam Noble Museum, and it sits on the campus of the University of Oklahoma, very near to the National Weather Center. When I taught in Oklahoma City, we took our second graders to this museum; at that time, the museum was in a previous incarnation.  It was bursting at the seems, longing for the space required to exhibit more of its specimens.  It was a humble structure, with wood floors and a largely unexhibited collection of prehistoric artifacts.

I have often complained about modern museums and their inclination to exhibit replicas and lookalikes, and the Sam Noble does have many of these (fake dinosaur skeletons and generic handmade goods from natives, for example), but they also display one large collection of the real things.

My family does not subscribe to macroevolution, so sorting through placards that explained items in these terms was a chore, a few weeks ago.  Regardless, there is much to see here for any family, and the multimillion dollar facility and the clean, high-quality displays are quite impressive.