Guys and Dolls go to Dance Camp
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By Taylor Johnson and Alexa Bradley
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On Wednesday October 29th, and Thursday October 30th Brodhead High School Show Choir, “Guys and Dolls”, had their annual dance camp. They took a day off of school and also came in on a day that there was no school to learn these dances. They invited back their world-renowned choreographers April James and Jarad Voss to help teach the group the dances. April taught the group very difficult dances to “I Want It All” by Queen, “Yeah Toast” from the Bob and Tom show, and “What is Love” by Haddaway. It took the group a while to even comprehend the complexity of the spacing, moves, and the counting involved in making a great show choir number. Jarad took the initiative this year to choose one of our pieces called “My Prerogative.” He also choreographed this song in a hip-hop style that was a little difficult for these very under-cultured brodheadian kids. For the next couple of months, Guys and Dolls will be working hard on perfecting and learning everything that is entailed in their wicked awesome show. Mr. Calhoon leads them saying, “1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8,” to try to help them get the counting in their heads. This helps the group get together as a team and really learn everything about their moves. The group has been assigned the task of coming in at least once a day to practice the show and to help improve upon the parts that they don’t know as well. If you walk into the chorus room on any given day during lunch, you will see a large group of show choir members dancing and practicing their little hearts out. Dance camp can be a very trying and frustrating time for many, but especially when it is your first time. This year we had eight freshmen that experienced the difficulty of dance camp. Surprisingly, they enjoyed it! When asked by Mr. Calhoon what she thought, Olivia Krumweide replied, “It was awesome!” While trying to memorize all of these many dance moves, the singer-dancers are helped out by something known as “muscle memory.” Muscle memory is the way that your body can remember what it is supposed to do even if your brain can’t. This helps them through repetition of the moves, cementing them into their brains. This dance camp, added on to the other one that the group had in September finishes off the “learning part” of the show, so now all they have to do is put the singing and the transitions in the show, practice for a long while, and then they will have a great show on their hands. Their first performance is on January 3rd; this is actually a preview performance of the show. They go on to have five compestitions, and 3 home shows as well as a group trip to compete in the prestigious “Fame” tour in Branson, Missouri. They hope that everyone can support them and come out and watch their show. Especially on February 28th, when they host their own invitational, “In The Spotlight 2008.” Show Choir takes a lot of dedication, effort, brainpower, teamwork, skills and most of all, a good attitude. So even if you personally don’t like to sing or dance, you can still show respect and be impressed by the 40-some teenagers from your school who put a lot of time and effort into making this show a success. Please come and support “Guys and Dolls” in all of their future accomplishments this year.
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| Follow the bouncing ball to Algebra Class
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There are many different labs that classes in the high school are doing this year; one of them is in Mr. Flory’s algebra class. This week they are doing the bouncing ball lab, consisting of, you guessed it, bouncing balls. Mr. Flory’s 7th hour class starts by getting into 9 groups of two. He then picks one very lucky student to hand out the lab sheets for the upcoming bouncing ball lab. Each group then gets the materials that consist of two meter sticks, a golf ball, a bouncy ball, and their lab packet. The class then goes out into the hall outside the B-pod and then they tape their two meter sticks to the lockers. After the meter sticks are properly attached to the locker, the students drop the golf ball several times to get average data entries. They then switch to using the bouncy ball, and drop that many times to record that data. After about 15 minutes of collecting data, ruler “sword” fights, and golf balls and bouncy balls rolling all over the halls, the class heads back to Flo-dawgs room. Flo-dawg is a name given to Mr. Flory by the members of the Brodhead Golf Team, but is not commonly used by his students. As the class gets back into the room Mr. Flory tells them they will now have to graph all of the results they gathered. Some of the students start whispering, “Hey how do you graph these things,” which Mr. Flory kindly responds by helping each student with their questions. After Mr. Flory explains more in depth about how to graph the results, and how to answer the questions most of the students say, Ohhh, as if the light bulb had just turned on. This lab teaches the students how to collect data from the experiments they did with the different types of balls, and then how to graph them on the graph. The students then answer questions about resiliency, extrapolation, and interpolation.
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