Part 6

For some reason, we had always taken it for granted that when the time came, I would be team leader. In addition to that one year of seniority, I was older than Leila by nine years, and I guess that's a lot of extra living when you're in your twenties and early thirties. Our long-range plan was to take turns as team leader once we got things established, but when the next school year started, it was I who was formally in charge.

That first month was filled with promise and opportunity. In one of our very first team meetings, Leila proposed changing the name of our team from the High Flyers to the Dolphins, and that seemed like a perfect inaugural gesture and the prelude to all we hoped to accomplish. For years we had gritted our teeth whenever the students had asked why we had to be the High Flyers when the other sixth grade team had a cool name like the Turbo Tigers, and we quickly grew tired of being forced to defend a lame nickname that we had had no part in choosing. "Seriously?" we'd ask each other, "What the hell is a high flyer anyway?" The other team had ferocious predators or cute images of Hobbes the tiger as their mascots, and we were stuck with random airplanes, hot-air balloons and the occasional UFO as our symbols. Plus, there was the unfortunate association of illegal intoxication when using "high" as an adjective. Unanimously, the team jumped in favor of the name change.

As far as the personnel changes that year, there were a couple of interesting ones: the Dolphins became the home to our school's Category II Special Education Class-- a self-contained program for severely cognitively impaired kids-- so their teacher was on our team, and in addition to her, the science teacher who had so abruptly left our team after my first year, the one Leila had been hired to replace, rejoined us as the math teacher. That gave us two more strong women who did not hesitate to speak their minds.

(yes, there's more on the way, but we're getting close)