I spent all day thinking it was Thursday, meaning that I thought tomorrow was Friday, and it’s not. Even sitting here right now, with this week’s pile of comic books sitting (unread) next to me, I’m having a difficult time comprehending the idea that I have two more days of work this week. It hasn’t been a bad week, all told; yesterday was emotionally rough but school has gone well this week and my classes have murdered their last couple of tests, which is awesome. I looked at the next unit test for my Algebra class, written by the high school teachers, and it was so fucking easy I damn near gave it to them after a day of working on functions. They’ll be ready for it on Monday. I won’t give it to them for a couple of weeks– time to dial the rigor up a bit, so that when they get the test and everybody gets 100% they’ll recognize how easy it is and laugh at it with me.

One thing about this group of kids, both my Algebra class and my kids in general this year: my Algebra class is hands-down the smartest and hardest-working group of kids I’ve ever worked with. It’s not close. And the funny thing is most of them are athletes, so the general vibe of the room is a bunch of really smart jocks as opposed to the cabal of nerds you might expect to see dominating an Algebra class. Even the rest of my classes, though? I’ve gotten used to anywhere from a quarter to half of my students failing during any given quarter, and there is nothing I can do about that short of simply handing over points and just inflating the shit out of their grades. There’s not much I can do if you never come to school and when you are in school you refuse to do any work. Just because you have to decide to fail my class doesn’t mean that a certain percentage of kids don’t gleefully make that decision every quarter.

This year? If you only count the kids who show up, I have less than ten total who are failing out of about 120. Maybe only seven or eight. That’s amazing. Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to see more commitment out of them nonetheless, but compared to the baseline I’ve had for the last several years– even last year in this same school– it’s going amazing. All that and only one real discipline problem out of all of my classes? Shit, it must be time for the other shoe to drop.