I am back in Wichita. I arrived Monday night after a full day of driving, and went straight to a farewell party for a friend from my church. He is in the Air Force and will be deployed to the Middle East tomorrow. This stay should only be 3 months, however, so that's nice.
I am thinking more and more about the beginning of school. We start meetings next Tuesday, and classes start the following week. They have added at least one new math position this year, so one classroom that was extremely large is being divided into two classrooms. I will be teaching in one of those two. I took some posters and school supplies and other stuff to my room yesterday. They had completed the wall, but that was about it. There were big pieces of extra wall sitting in one corner; everything was covered in the dust of the construction; and almost none of the furniture I'll need for the school year was there- no teacher desk or chair, no filing cabinets, no phone, no projector screen, only one bookshelf that might even belong to another teacher. Also, there were tables in the room instead of the desks that I should have when school starts.
The point being that there was really nothing I could do to start getting the room ready for the year. And tomorrow I leave for Florida w/three friends to visit another friend who is living there. We won't get back till Monday, and meetings start Tuesday. All the teachers I've talked to have said to get the room decorated and organized and everything before inservices start, b/c once they do, things will be totally crazy and I'll have so much other stuff to do on the "classroom workdays" that I won't have any time to actually work in my classroom. Oh, well. It looks like waiting until inservices start will be my only option. It's probably better that I will be out of town until then, b/c if I were here and actually COULD be working in my room, it would probably make me even more mad that the room wasn't ready.
When I was at the school yesterday, I did get a chance to talk w/one of the other math teachers. She was very friendly and offered lots of good advice, like suggesting that I call the principal ASAP and in a friendly way let him know what things I still need in the room before school starts. My friend Jeff was w/me, and he was just full of questions and comments for her. You'd think he was a teacher himself, but he's not. He's just overtalkative. (Sorry, Jeff) BUT, one good thing that did come of that was that he asked about policies on cellphones and other electronic devices in the classroom. The other teacher said students are not to have them out at all in class. If a student has anything like that out during a test, she just assumes they are cheating. She said sometimes they don't like that, but she tells them, "Go complain to the school board if you want. It doesn't matter to me; I have a contract w/them, you don't. So complain all you want." I think that's a good philosophy! Although as far as I've come in the last 10 years, I still don't think I'm quite thick-skinned enough to wholeheartedly take that attitude. Maybe I'll get there by the end of this year.
Well, my other big news is that I'm going to be looking for a new place to live, it looks like. One of our roommates just moved out last week, and another is moving out the end of this month. Since we have no prospects for new roommates, even after looking for a couple months, and since we can't afford to live in that big house w/just two of us, we gave our 30-day notice to move out on Labor Day weekend. That's something I really didn't have time for this month, but when is the next long weekend? And how many months do I want to pay double rent? So it seems like the only logical thing to do. We'll see how it goes looking for a new place.
Goodness, this has been a long entry. And I haven't even said anything about music ministry. Well, I guess that's OK; some weeks are going to be that way. Well, thanks for sticking w/me through all these ramblings. God bless you all.
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