24

One time, back in the good 'ole days when AWG was my neighbor, he came over and had us watch that show, 24. Although I never saw it again, it was a pretty interesting show and every episode is like an hour of a single day or something like that. Anyway, I thought of the show when I noticed last night that there are 34 working days left in the school year and I have 10.5 days of sick leave remaining. Basically, today makes 24 days that I have left to work. This is the first of 24 "countdown" posts that I'll be posting.

Today, we will be going to our second track meet and leaving school around 1:00. Since I will be gone for my last two periods of the day, I thought I'd give the three morning classes some free time to talk or whatever. They know the expectations (stay in your seat, keep the volume down, etc.) and most of them follow these expectations. A few kids in third period thought it would be cute to start throwing paper, so I wrote their asses up and sent them out.

Of course, I get called in to the assistant principal's office, who tells me that he can't do anything to them if there wasn't an assignment. I expected as much, but I neglected to mention to him that he probably wouldn't have done much if I had been teaching. I'm proud of myself for keeping my tongue held on that matter. I encountered this one time last year (although the students had an assignment on that occasion and the student lied to the principal and said we hadn't been doing anything) so it wasn't much of a surprise. What baffles me, however, is that there isn't a set expectation for student behavior under any circumstance. That's one thing that disillusions me about this whole public ed. business. There's ALWAYS some excuse for bad behavior.

Well, in a short time, we'll be heading out to the track meet. We'll probably get our asses whipped, but I suppose we'll have fun and I'll be able to mark off another day. A recap will be available for your viewing tomorrow in a post entitled, "23."