Here’s the thing, chirren.

I’ve had another “principal for a morning” event since the one I describe in these two posts from Sunday.  I didn’t mention it on the blog.  In fact, I posted pictures of my dinner instead.  Why?  Because nothing of any real seriousness happened.  Thursday was a day from hell.  There is no damn doubt about that at all.   And it is amazing to me just how much I didn’t know about how difficult being a principal was prior to taking a job where I work in the office at my school.

I didn’t have to deal with teachers.

I didn’t have to deal with the union.

I didn’t have to deal with downtown.

I just had to deal with discipline, and it produced a day busy enough that it produced over five thousand words of blogging.  now, hopefully it was entertaining blogging and y’all didn’t just tl;dr me and hit Like, but both posts are seeing pretty good traffic, so people are at least clicking on it.

And here’s where this ties in with my other educational obsession: my school added a hundred and twenty-five new transfer students this year.  We acquired those kids because we’re a good school and parents are pulling their kids from other crappier schools and sending them our way.  And the first month or so of school has been rough as hell because a lot of those transfer kids, as well as a gaggle of kids from Chicago and Michigan City, aren’t necessarily getting with the program on how things work around here.  My boss begins nearly every conversation with “Where did you go to school last year?” because nearly every kid who lands in the office is a new student.  All three of my major trouble kids, plus about 2/3 of the rest, were new to the building.

When these kids, who have been in failing schools for years, drag down our test scores– as, inevitably, they will, because that’s how math works— our teachers will be blamed, and our school’s ranking will go down.

Because we succeeded, and other parents sent their kids to us.

Let that roll around in your head a little bit.