if work permits

     I wrote the following paragraph of this post almost three weeks ago.  The next graph at least 10 days ago.  I guess that means I was to busy to finish what I started...  Since then, I've flown to Montana for a wedding in the middle of a week, and effectively fallen behind every other aspect of my responsibilities (not to mention everyday life, like eating real food).  Before tonight, I've been at home this week, NOT sleeping, for probably an average of one hour per day.  The rest of the hours have been schooling, practicing, or sleeping.  Or, traveling between those states of being, to be fair.  This makes it more difficult to follow-up my argument from my first post this year, that point being the second year has started off much better than the first.  Still going with that angle though, because as bad as this week has been, it's easily better than last year at this time.  No contest.

     There have been frustrating aspects of year two, of course.  Two things I can think of, specifically, currently.  Firstly, my eighth-graders are acting like seventh-graders.  Last year I shared some theories on why there was such a big difference between the adjacent grade levels.  Here are my current ideas... Having a lot of the same kids is a two-way street.  I know them and how they operate, but they start the year on the comfort-level that they reached with me by the end of last year.  That's been difficult to contain.  In addition, we are in the same classroom as seventh grade last year.  So, it all feels the same.  I've already had more trouble, class management-wise, than I had all of last year in my one golden section (8B), which leads me to my other theory.  I had an extraordinary group of students in medieval history last year.  I was slow to realize that, since I had nothing to compare them to.  They were, as a group, somewhat reserved.  That's how I prefer it..  Even the less-dedicated students' most common choice of non-cooperation was to NOT participate, rather than participate in the wrong way.

The other test for me thus far has been to accept that our athletic department can’t make the jump from mediocre to perfect in one year.  Quick background: Scottsdale Prep’s athletic program had the lowest satisfaction rating in the Great Hearts’ network last year, and it was well-deserved (this is especially telling in light of the fact we actually win a lot of games, which usually makes people happy in itself).  Anyway, the root cause was primarily a lack of communication, on many fronts.  I recognized this last year, and my solution was to create a new position, sell it to the admin, and prove I was the best man for the job.  They tweaked my idea, but I got the position.  It was a win-win for me, since I was already dedicating so much time to our sports.  May as well get some official recognition for it.  Now, we have four people involved in the department, instead of the 1.5 from last year.  We’re better in a lot of ways.  Nevertheless, a lot of the same problems are still around.  We don’t have a football field, or any fields for that matter.  We operate on the whims of decent fields in the area.  Within our first two weeks of practice, I’d had three days where I had to change our practice location on a few hours notice.  I had absolutely no control over it, I just had to pass it on to the parents.  We also had a giant mix-up where the high school football team took the junior high jerseys for a scrimmage game, and when we tried to hand out jerseys after school one day there was no equipment to hand out.  I had spent two hours cataloguing every item the week before, and it all just disappeared.  That sort of thing may not seem like a huge deal, but it builds up.  Established, well-organized programs don’t have to deal with those glitches.

Those are the two most glaring negatives I can think of so far this year.  The thing they have in common? They're both nit-picking negatives, or focusing on negative aspects of positive situations.  My classes have been great, and our athletic department is much-improved, but my expectations are so high that I'm hyper-aware of anything less than perfection.  That in itself says a lot about my overall experience thus far.

This is a boring post, but I have to get it out of the way, because I have a few posts backlogged in my head and I feel like I can't get to them until this one's out there.

I'm waking up to run with the cross country team at 5:15 a.m.  I wrote that to keep myself accountable.