After five weeks of practicing my rough Norwegian, eating brown cheese daily, along with a journey north of the Arctic Circle to Rovaniemi Finland, along with a trip for a little city sprint action in Dusseldorf, it’s been nice to get back to the Northwest. Along with getting in a couple kilometers on the old familiar trails of Leavenworth, I dropped into Mr. Peck’s class and caught up with Mr. Peck’s class before heading a little farther North back up to the Methow Valley. Up here I’m getting back in touch with the seventh and eighth graders in Mrs. Beavon’s AVID class that looks to close the achievement gap of these talented and inspired, though sometimes sidetracked, students. It’s pretty cool to see how much progress the kids have made in class here. Also out the door here the snow is piled high, almost reaching the windowsills of my little cabin in the woods. br /br /object width=”640″ height=”385″param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/qcQ942cT23s?fs=1amp;hl=en_US”/paramparam name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”/paramparam name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”/paramembed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/qcQ942cT23s?fs=1amp;hl=en_US” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”640″ height=”385″/embed/objectdiv class=”blogger-post-footer”img width=’1′ height=’1′ src=’https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/2910103639238326543-7678675898545288698?l=methowolympicdevelopment.blogspot.com’ alt=” //div