My Schedule

Well, two days of school are in the books. I don’t have a horribly difficult schedule, in my opinion, but some of the classes are challenging. This is what I have for the first semester:

07:48-07:53 Homeroom
07:57-09:17 (1) AP English Literature & Composition
09:21-10:41 (2) Wellness & Nutrition
10:45-11:13 Tutorial Period
11:17-11:57 (3A) Concert Band
11:59-12:29 (3B) Lunch
12:31-13:11 (3C) Concert Choir
13:15-14:35 (4) AP Chemistry

There are pros and cons to the four-by-four block scheduling we use. Pro: One only has four (in some cases, five) classes to worry about each day. Con: There are only 90 days (instead of 180) to cover a whole year’s worth of material.

Example: Tuesday night for AP Chemistry (first day), I had to read Chapters 1 and 2 of a brand new AP-level book. Granted, all but two of the 68 pages were totally review from Chem I, but it was still a lot of reading. Today we reinforced the unfamiliar part, and did some review sheets. The test is tomorrow.

Please keep in mind that this is an extreme example and represents only one day in an entire semester. Some (hopefully most) days will be lighter than this, at least from Chemistry. Some will probably be heavier. Oh, well. That’s life.

In other news, I have 1.85 new teachers this semester. I had my AP English Lit teacher for Honors English 11 last year, but he’s got a student teacher now (.25). My Wellness & Nutrition teacher is completely new to me (1) and the Choir Director is a newbie (.5, because it’s half a block). Also, the Band Director (Mr. Dearbeck, see “Forty-four Chairs”) is a first-year teacher, but I’ve known him personally for years (.1). Total: 1.85.

Meanwhile, marching band is going well. I’ll have more posts later.

Eve of School, Deceleration of Blogs

Ah, Labor Day. It hardly feels like September, but alas, the calendar doesn’t lie. School starts tomorrow for me, and I can honestly say that I have never anticipated the first day of any school year as much as I have this past week.

See, the administrative offices of my school district were housed in third-floor classrooms of the middle school. Now the middle school needs to use those classrooms as classrooms because our enrollment is growing faster than we can keep up. So, they built an addition onto the high school building during the spring and summer and the administration moved across the street two weeks ago. The only real loss to the building was a first-floor classroom’s only window that was covered up by the back end of the addition. My physics teacher is happy that his second-story window directly above didn’t have to be sacrificed.

However, all this has had an effect on my immediate state of sanity. You see, in order to ensure that the administration would be moved out in time for the new middle school teachers to move into the classrooms, my school district decided to delay the first day of school by a week. However, after mid-August, there’s really nothing to do before school starts. Thus, around the last week of August I get a long-term headache of some sort, mostly from not doing anything of consequence all day.

Except this year, summer vacation lasts into September, for the first time in six years! Which each passing day, I am awaiting the first day of school which increasing anxiety. I got bored back in June. Camps kind of filled up the time in between. Now, I’m all set to go to school, as soon as possible (and no, I can’t believe I actually said that).

While school is on the horizon, however, something else is lurking. It is the inevitable deceleration of blogs. I’ve already seen it, in fact. Currently, I only regularly read four other blogs, all of which have been started since May, and all of which are authored by people who have already started their school year. This past week, I’ve already noticed a sharp decline in the number of posts from most of them.

How can we fight this? I don’t know. We could write shorter, but more frequent posts. Getting up early and staying up late are viable options, too. For the most part, however, I think we just need to remember that now that the school year is upon us, our lives will be more interesting. We will be interacting with other people on a daily basis, not just here and there. It will all get better.

I hope that this deceleration will slow and turn into an acceleration after a few slow weeks. School just takes an adjustment.