Wow, where does the time go? Almost seven months since my last confession. Forgive me, blog-father, for I have sinned…
Okay, my room issue was resolved at the semester. The AP came through, peach of a gal that she is. Good sign: she's going to be our principal next year.
But that doesn't mean that the overall situation wil be 100% resolved, and I reserve the right to be curmudgeonly about it. Call me Don Quixote, and it will be my windmill; call me Ahab (not Ishmael) and it will be my white whale; call me Nemo, and it will be my underwater utopia, where men do not wage war against each other or the surface of the planet they inhabit (fooled you with that one, didn't I?)
So someone asked my yesteday, "Jeff, when you retire, who will you teach?"
I replied, "Whom."
she said, "That's what I mean."
Tonight is Open House, which I find disappointing in high school. In middle school, we usually had a good turnout; high school parents are less involved. good in a my-kid-must-grow-up developmental way. Bad in a I-decorated-my-room-for-30-parents? way. I've lost some heart. Before, it was s slideshow of kids at football games and in class on the LCD projector, jazz music, coffee for everyone, and work crowding the walls. Tonight? Yeah, I'm here for the prescribed time period. I'll still enjoy talking to parents, but without a good crowd that provides a critical mass, it just ain't the same, I tell 'ya.
I fell behind in my grading from being sick for six weeks earlier this semester, and I'm still behind the 8-ball. I don't mean in-bed sick: I mean drag myself to work and back, lie exhausted on the couch until bedtime, wake in the morning after 9 hours in the arms of Morpheus dead tired, pull on clothes and do it another day sick. Crazy that it lasted that long, but it did. So the stack of grading greweth. For progress reports, I just notified the Your Kid Is In Danger Of Failing parents, and left it at that.
About 20 regular class meetings before finals week, and I have to get my sophomores through 200pgs of To Kill a Mockingbird. So I'm trimming two pages here and five pages there, giving them the essentials of the story. I don't feel entirely cheap, because I'm only cutting out the ancestry-and-breeding sections at this point. The story does not suffer if they don't know who Simon Finch is or where his trading post was in the 1800s. I hope I don't have to cut much else, because it would begin to compromise some of the overarching themes of this wonderful story, and I respect the novel too much to do that. I may have to resort to assigning a couple of chapters as homework reading and tell them that material will be included on the next reading quiz. Fair enough. And the movie is good (both because it follows the novel faithfully, and succeeds in providing the small southern town vibe that modern teenage suburbanites don't pull sucessfuly from the pages, so I'd hate to have to sacrifice that. I'll work it out.
I hate long blog posts, so I'll cut this off before it gets too tedious.
