"...share the fun."

I swear that my horoscope says this today: "LIBRA: Your job may be the pits, but your social life will be quite fabulous! Indulge yourself and share the fun."

Well, my job wasn't exactly "the pits," and my social life isn't exactly "quite fabulous"! Today wasn't bad, if I disregard getting up early and trying to function on no sleep. We had a long faculty meeting before lunch,and then we had an English Department meeting from 2:00 until 3:00.

Naturally, we talked about NCLB and AYP. All the schools in the system made it, but the school system didn't make it. How can this be? First of all, it is being appealed. There is a problem because some kid transferred out of the school, then came back, then transferred out again. The figures apparently do not add up, and the state department doesn't have a big old calculator to figure it out.

We watched the ethics video, same one as last year. The acting is bad and situations exaggerated. We laughed at the video, but that doesn't mean that we don't take ethics seriously. I think the administrators are troubled by the laughter, because they always say something about it the seriousness of this information. One of the "teachers" portrayed in the movie has a gun in his drawer; another jumps out the window with drugs. We know how serious it is; we see the news. The items in the news are not humorous...this video is.

There are lots of new people in our school, and I find it worrisome that so many teachers left. It is important to build a faculty that will last and can plan ahead to structure the future. Starting over every year with new folks is not a good idea. I believe this because we have had a high turnover in our English department at the ninth and tenth grade level for years.

Maybe I just don't tolerate change well...! One change involves my coteacher--she is leaving to teach at the primary school level because her certificate is for that age. Fortunately, the school has hired her daughter to teach in her position with me! I taught her daughter a few years ago. Her first assignment is to clean out my file cabinet (joke). My file cabinet is the most ungodly mess of unfiled piles and stacks of papers that anyone has ever seen. It will take all year to dig through. My new coteacher might find some of her old work in there if she looks hard enough.