If you guys don't comment on this, I'm going to stop writing.

When I am asked how I like my school, my canned response is that it has all of the good traits and all of the bad traits of a charter school. Buy was that true today, a nd it very nearly ate my soul.

When I say good traits, I mean flexibility, lack of bureaucratic red tape, and willingness to try crazy shit. Bad things can include, for instance, a total incompetence at administrative tasks. To wit: this week was the beginning of the new quarter, and the schedule was completely fuckocked. Allow me to numerate some of the issues that would never be allowed to happen at a traditional school:

• Teachers did not recieve a copy of the schedule until the first day of the quarter. this did not seem odd until we realized that our classes had been completely moved around, and one of mine had been canceled entirely, replaced with another section of something I was already teaching.
• Neither did students recieve a copy of their new fuckocked schedules until the first day they were in effect. The ingenious method contrived to distribute the schedules to the students was to hand them out as they arrived late for first period. the inevitable backlog led to another opportunity for me to use my new word: fuckocked.
• Once the schedules were in the hands of those to whom they applied--students and staff--mor problems became apparent. for example, more than one class--and in at least one case three classes--being scheduled in the same room at the same time with different teachers.
• students being scheduled for two different classes at the same time
• students being scheduled for classes they had already taken
• students being scheduled for classes they vehemently did not want or did not meet the prerequisites for: for example, putting students in advanced English who hate English and suck at it.
• upwards of fifty students being scheduled into the same class in some cases.

• etc. etc.etc.

Needless to say, we are all terribly grateful for the long weekend, and I hopeI have some idea what I'm actually teaching by the time we get back.

Sidenote: by way of things that are great about charter schools, we decided in our meeting this morning to just forget first and second periods on MTuesday and herd everybody into the auditorium to watch the inauguration. Just like that, we decided, and it was done. I snap my fingers here.

Snow Day

It's an odd day here at the New America School. Adams District 12 doesn't close. Come Armageddon, we will be fully operational sa the Lord strikes every one of our staff members and most of our students down with metors as retibrution for their wicked ways. So here we are as the rest of Denver and four surrounding counties stay at home with a novel and an electric blanket.

Which is ironical [sic], because there are so few students that holding classes is ludicrous. Only half of the staff is even here, although those intrepid soldiers are trickling in gradually. We have herded the twenty or so students that are here into three classrooms, Study hall, games or movie. I am in charge of the movie. I figure I would take the otherwise wasted time to put two cents worth of effort into this irrelevant and neglected blog.