Ivan Barkdoll, a math teacher, has several interesting traditions he has been doing with his classes for many years.
Barkdoll has been working at McClintock for many years, and his traditions have become a part of McClintock’s history.
“I have been doing the turkey bowling tradition for 13 years or so. In fact, another teacher named Mr. Rothery who used to teach here started it and our classes used to compete against each other, and we even have a trophy that has a big turkey on the top of it. After he left, it was just my class that continued it,” Barkdoll said.
Turkey bowling has been around for a while.
“In turkey bowling, we take a frozen turkey and we tape it all up and we make a handle on it. Then we roll it down the sidewalk to knock down all the pins, and the pins are empty soda pop bottles,” Barkdoll said.
In another of Barkdoll’s Thanksgiving traditions, his AP Statistics class gathers around and enjoys the different varieties of food.
“Thanksgiving Sampling Distribution Banquet started in 2012 by a student named Raluca Mihalcescu. We have a fancy dress-up Thanksgiving meal for AP Statistics,” Barkdoll said. “She was someone who liked to plan parties and we happened to have a bunch of people in that class that like to cook things and liked to make unusual favorite dishes and so everybody just brought something that was either special to their family’s Thanksgiving or a special kind of thing that they like to cook.”
Aside from giving thanks, Barkdoll has a Halloween tradition called Hollow Squash Day that all his classes enjoy.
“There’s no purpose for Hollow Squash, it’s something that is just for fun. My favorite pumpkins are the traditional jack-o-laterns that have the triangle eyes and the smile,” Barkdoll said.
The thing that Barkdoll finds very interesting in Hollow Squash is the categories that students vote for.
“In some years they vote on what categories they want to compete in, and in some years there are some really good categories. In a previous year, a category was Ms. Zinke and they had to try to make their pumpkins look like Ms. Zinke,” Barkdoll said.
There is one interesting holiday event in particular that no one has actually yet discovered.
“I think that Ghetto Santa is just a myth that people talked so much about, like bigfoot, they haven’t really seen him but they think they have and they’ve convinced themselves many times that they’ve seen him. Students talked of him, but never describe what he looks like. I’ve never seen him myself,” Barkdoll said.
Barkdoll not only creates events that are just for fun, but also events that can help students academically.
“Math Olympics is something where we go outside and do a combination of math review, athletic events, and goofy events. Each event has a math, athletic, and goofy portion. The event itself doesn’t help students, but the review we do before the event does help,” Barkdoll said.
As soon as the students rejuvenate from Math Olympics, they get to show off their skills in Survivor.
“Survivor is something fun we do in the 4th quarter. When the show first came out, no one knew what it was. Some of the students just made up the rules of what they thought the show was going to be about,” Barkdoll said.
The first year when Barkdoll played this game, his students caught him by surprise.
“The very first year we played, the second or third day everybody voted for the same person and I was surprised. I didn’t know they were going to do that. I didn’t hear anyone talking about picking the same person. As I counted the votes, I was amazed that everyone picked the same exact person. It caught me by total surprise,” Barkdoll said.
Just recently, Barkdoll has added something new to the game.
“Now we play where every person has a mystery name. One year it got down to three people and all of the people that were left had their mystery names in it as well. The person with the mystery name voted the other person off until one person won first and second place,” Barkdoll said.
