I didn’t make it over to school today; I woke up this morning and the thought of getting out of bed was just unimaginable, much less driving a million thousand miles away and throwing desks around all afternoon. So I get to do it tomorrow! Hooray!

Instead, today got swallowed up by, to start, (other than lazing about, I mean) some research into what it would take to add high school mathematics to my teaching license. I don’t want to move up to high school but it’s come to my attention that I have a fair number of seventh graders in my honors algebra class, which is already a ninth-grade class, which means that those kids are going to take Geometry next year, which technically I’m not allowed to teach? So I’m looking into that. I have to learn enough calculus to pass an exam, though, which … eek. I may have dropped out of Calculus 3/4 of the way through my senior year of high school and not looked at it since then; don’t tell anybody.

Tonight was eaten up by a kind of ridiculous little project; I have 152 kids on my roster so far (that number will– is guaranteed— to change) but just for the sheer hell of it I went through last year’s Student of the Month database and compared that list of kids to my class roster. I discovered that 58% of the students who won SOTM last year are in my class, which is already a nice slant, probably accounted for by the fact that I have the Honors kids, and that of those 152 kids on roster eighty-four of them won SOTM at least once last year. 55%. And it’s not like that guarantees that the other 45% are knuckleheads, either. I have a couple– literally, two– who I know to keep an eye on from last year, but it’s literally two kids. I think I can handle two Project Kids(*) during the first few weeks while I figure out who the rest of my hot spots are.

(*) This looks kinda racist. I mean Kids Who I Have Decided To Make a Project Of, not Kids From Project Housing.

I’ll post classroom pictures tomorrow, especially if I make any serious changes from how the room looked last year. The problem is with the style of desks I have and the layout of the classroom I have, putting everything in straight rows is really the only solution that makes sense, or at least the only solution that I’ve been able to come up with so far, but maybe I’ll have a burst of inspiration tomorrow. We’ll see.

Also, I think that everyone who spoke up the last time I mentioned having BlueSky invites is taken care of, but I got another code today, so if you’re still out in the cold and you need one (or if I missed you last time) let me know.