Some of you did help me more than I could expect and it's been a while since I last told you about how things were going. Sorry about that. So, well, things are going extremely well.
Guess what happened. The local newspaper published our story! Here it is:
[img]http://carpentier.multimaths.net/media/YonneRépublicaine020208S.jpg[/img]
As you can see the article is really big. It took about half the sports page! There's a huge photo which was taken in my classroom. It rained a lot that day and you can't see water dripping from my hair because I had to run in the rain to go and get the gloves from my trunk when the journalist came.
The article is entitled "A teacher's American dream". The journalist starts by saying I had the crazy idea to set up a ball club with the spontaneous help from American glove collectors. Then she goes on describing how the whole idea came up, how I wanted to find a new way to teach English and found that the history of baseball was closely linked to the American History at large since the mid 1800s, and then how I got so hooked by the theme that I soon wanted to have my own glove and thus found Brett's forum by chance. She explains how I wrote on the forum that I would set up a club if I had equipment but didn't have any. This simple sentence set up a chain of solidarity from all over the US, she says, and soon two huge packages arrived. I really like the passage when she describes me and says I would take out documents from my bag like a small kid would show his treasures. All my friends said she really understood who I was!
I also told her how the first session saw only two kids show up, and how finally there were 14 players on our team on the day of the interview. She doesn't know her article added 2 news players to the gang!
Then she asked me about the way the kids reacted to the game, and I told her they were at least as excited as I was. Two of them got gloves for Christmas, another one got one on eBay a couple of weeks ago.
The last paragraph explains that an exchange scheme may also take place some time next year between the US and our school. The article ends by saying I would like to create a real baseball club in Sens (my home town), and I'd be glad to receive offers from other local baseball fans like me.
She also added a small paragraph entitled "Baseball for Dummies" in which she explains the most basic rules of the game, and a few things about the basic gear. You can see she pasted the forum's address in the very last paragraph.
So how does it feel to be famous on the other side of the Atlantic?
Attaboy, Moonlight! 