HTMMA Vingettes

POLS

Three little letters are all they are, P.O.L, stands for Presentation of Learning, but there is so much more. You truly only spend a few days on them, so someone new may say, “What’s the big deal?” However your whole pass/fail of the grade rides on whether you pass or fail you POL, that means that they decide whether you go to summer school. Those are two words that should never be together.
Then to top that all off they throw this at you, there are not one but two POLs during the course of the year, that means that you have to dodge not one but two bullets. Luckily they are spaced apart quite far, so you have time to recover and face the next one.

Aviation Intersession

Two full weeks away from school (well sort of, we were still technically in school), sounds like heaven doesn’t it. Well it was. We did have to learn stuff thou, but don’t get it wrong it was still fun, and definitely not boring.
We started out at school and learned about lift and other basic principals of flight (and demonstrating them by making paper and model airplanes, at school, how cool is that). Then we went to the Aerospace museum in Balboa Park for the rest of the time and did tours and for to sit and do classes in the Board of Directors room. That room was cool, it had these huge leather swivel chairs that I swear must have had a mild sedative in them, because as soon as you sat down in them you would start to fall asleep, even if you were wide awake a moment before.
We also built and launched model rockets at Fiesta Island for the day (very cool, some went 1000 feet high!) The final day was the best of all, because we got to go flying in a real Cessna. It only sat 2-3 people and was a lot bumpier than the big planes, but that made it all the more fun. At some points it felt like you were free falling because you dropped so fast. But at the end of that day, unfortunately, it was time to say goodbye, and head back to normal school, (but not until after two weeks of spring break!)