Exercise #6 - Hoopies

Write a piece about Hoopies or zazen, or one in which either hoopies or zazen appear. You must of course decide what you want hoopies or zazan to be.

I was teaching fourth grade in a small private Catholic school in Pittsburgh PA. Not the type of Catholic school you might picture in your mind, blond wealthy students in uniform plaid skirts or suit jackets, but a Catholic school in a poor neighborhood, at one time close to being shut down for lack of enrollment, that is now funded privately and allows parents to pay less than 1,000 a year for their children to attend, with siblings at a significant discount and additional scholarship funding available.
My students mostly bought their outfits at Wal-mart or Target, their navy or black pants or skirts and white, navy or black polo shirts and 95 percent of them were on the free/reduced lunch program.
I had a class of 23 wiggly, enthusiastic kids, who I had decided to give a 20 minute afternoon recess to at all costs. The result of my summer of research into behavior and classroom management and the advice of my kindergarten assistant from years before. My school did not give recess other than about 10 minutes attached onto the lunch period that my kids were mostly too full or too excited to take advantage of.
I sat outside on the picnic bench in the sun watching all of my efforts paying off. My kids loving their daily recess and my satisfaction with the sunshine and the few kids who liked to periodically sit next to me and have a chat.
Some of our daily equipment included hula hoops and some girls were flipping them over themselves and the jumping over them sort of like jump ropes. They called this doing hoopies. I was of course too tall to do a hoopie myself. They would count who could do the most the fastest and we had a reigning champion.