Today

Arrive at school a few minutes before 8. Greet teachers, students, staff. Some students have work for me—late, but better than never. One teacher is planning a field trip to the Holocaust Museum, and needs to check arrangements. We gather for a teachers’ verse at 8:15, then disperse. I don’t teach first period, so I can check weekend email, make photocopies for my two morning classes, answer the Office Manager’s questions. We have applications on which to follow up, an upcoming visit from the building inspector, a fundraising dinner, a tennis team to put together. A parent shows up, unannounced, to ask for a few minutes. I just don’t have them, so we agree to meet tomorrow morning. 9:05, precalculus class. We just finished sequences and series, so we’ll take a couple of weeks for SAT review—mostly strategy and tactics, but it will also show what topics we could fruitfully review before the end of the year. The kids are in a good mood, first day back from a week off, colds mostly healed, happy to see each other again. Then Morning Meeting at 10—students circle the room and shake each teacher’s hand; announcements for the day and the week; sign-ups for a parent-provided hot lunch two days a week; welcome a new student who joined our 11^th grade—that’s three new students for the spring semester. Our little school is growing. Then Robert Frost’s “Choose Something Like a Star,” which we’re learning as a school, students and teachers together, and Rudolf Steiner’s morning verse. Then fifteen minutes to sip coffee and review notes for a seminar (100 min. class) in cell biology. Class starts, everyone present, and we’re off. Prokaryotes, eukaryotes, bacterial diseases, oil-spill clean-up, fermentation, surface-area-to-volume ratios. An unplanned digression to discuss scale, to try to give some sense of a micrometer and then a nanometer. Then another digression into meaning—a cell is a “unit,” but only has meaning if we understand the context in which it functions. I used to stop class for misbehavior. Now I move kids around if necessary, and don’t stop the class for much. Pick up the pace and everyone has to pay attention. Then lunch time. I’m alone at the desk for a few minutes, and can catch up on phone messages and email, then 15 minutes, literally, to eat some egg salad and have another cup of coffee. Then pile the 9^th and 10^th graders into the bus to drive to a nearby athletic center for volleyball. I drop them, and head for the local community college for a meeting with the director and one of our trustees—we’re looking into renting space from them as we grow. They have an art room we could use. What’s the rent? Can we use storage in the back? Will our schedule mesh with theirs? I worked for this college ten years ago, and the director is the same. We chat—her son was a part-time policeman then, now a chief-of-police. The director will retire next year. Then a brief strategic planning meeting, and off to pick up the kids from volleyball. They spend the last fifteen minutes of the day cleaning the school, so I walk around checking their work. No paper towels in the downstairs bathroom. Who’s job is that? We need a substitute to clean the blackboards. The senior class is in charge, and they find someone to do it. Then handshakes good-bye all around, lock the school, and drive six students to the elementary school to catch buses home. I get home around 3:15 to snack and spend another hour and a half returning phone calls and answering emails. I change, drive to the gym for an hour and a half, then home to cook and eat. Janis is here to help, but she has a planning board meeting this evening, followed by a case study for grad school, which she started this spring. I have notes to write for classes tomorrow, but, because it’s the start of a new seminar, no student work to correct for a change. Hence, time to write this. The TV is on in the background—I love 30 Rock re-runs. Bed around 10:30—I’m reading Jesse Ball’s The Way Through Doors and Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror and Rudolf Steiner’s The Christian Mystery and this week’s New Yorker. Lights out before eleven. With luck, I’ll sleep most of the way through the night and do it all again tomorrow.