Saturday at the Rienstra house

Ron challenged me to a blog-off regarding the Rienstra-Keeley July 4th Weekend family get-together that we had yesterday at Ron’s parents’ place on Lake Michigan. It was wonderful. We got things off to a great start with lots of food preparation and discussion about grading and defending grades to students. Grading turned out to be a theme for much of the day – Ron is just fresh off a semester as a TA at Fuller so he had some students who were not happy with his grades and we spent a fair amount of time thinking together about the difference between criterion-referenced grades and norm-referenced grades (although I’m not sure those terms ever got mentioned). I’m a fan of criterion-referenced grading because I think it is more inherently fair unless the school at which you are grading specifically states that the grades are norm-referenced. Ron was told to be norm-referenced at the beginning of the semester and that was perhaps a big part of the issue. Bethany is soon going to be in the same position so she particularly interested.

Laura made some wonderful stuffed mushrooms with apparently only a few of us liked (the kids were not about to try them) so I had lots of them which is a great thing. Ron showed us his skill as the Grill Master and I took up the mantle as Assistant Grill Master (or is that Assistant to the Grill Master?) Either way, the burgers were great and so was the salad that Laura made (I was the assistant salad maker – or at least the assistant to the salad maker). After dinner and conversation (which included Ron’s mom and dad) about the Emerging Church movement and Debra’s work we retired to the beach.

A rousing game of Frisbee keep-away for some of us and a walk down the beach for others tired us out just enough that we went up to the deck and heard about Alexander the Great’s horse Bucephalus, and graduation ceremonies (focusing on rocks and presidents).

Back to Holland for fireworks (where Meredith joined us). It was a wonderful day. The best part was having our two families together again for the first time in nearly a year.