I ain't 'fraid of no Spring

Today's not only the first day of March (already!) but also the first day of the work week (already!!) and the first day of the 5th six weeks grading period on campus (already!!!). So while it's a day of new beginnings, including this beginning paragraph of my now "plan your mortgage payment around my consistently reliable" monthly blogs, it's also a red-letter day for things coming to an end.

Sadly, the weekend is over once again. It seems like there's always more hours between Monday and Friday than there ever are between Saturday and Sunday (and I guess that's for a reason). I never get the time to do all the things I always mean to on the weekends. With all the practice we have getting used to Monday morning arriving all too quickly, you'd think we'd be great at facing Mondays, but it never gets any easier. At least we had some great weather yesterday and Saturday, and it was so nice to be watching it through a window while labored over a computer writing three more letters of recommendations. I did get some great time with my own two children (and even my wife!), after which I told them that I was "sincerely grateful for the time we spent together, and that I enthusiastically and wholeheartedly recommended them for a scholarship." Indeed, the weekends should be called the "strong" ends.

Good thing I love my job, so Mondays aren't really something I dread. In fact, I was rather excited about going to school today, because today marked the first day of the end of something else: my tenure as interim Statistics teacher. No offense to all the wonderful stat students I got to teach the past two months, and no offense to statistics itself, which is, after all, still math (and boy do I love math at least as much as I love jalapenos, and I DO love jalapenos and coffee (not together, though) (see previous blog entries)). Rather, the relinquishing of statistics to its rightful, maternity-leave-returning teacher gives me much of my free time back, time that can now be spent doing other productive things like blogging, helping my daughter spell "George Washington," trimming Crepe Myrtles, feeding my two dogs (they're so awfully thin!), writing letters of recommendation before 2 a.m., and calculating confidence intervals just 'cause I wanna.

Best of all, the temporary teaching arrangement, which required my department head to teach my 2nd period precal class after observing me teach it 1st period so that she could ensure that my own 2nd period precal class, the one I would be leaving in the hands of the department head so that I could go across the hall to teach statistics to a different class, which I learned to also call "my own," would get the exact same lesson so that when I quizzed them the next day, when I was back, while the stat class worked on a worksheet that covered the lesson from the previous day, would be able to do well on the quiz I was to give them that covered precal material I did not teach them but that they were still, nonetheless, taught. Yeah, all that is over. The department head gets her planning period back, I get my 2nd period precal class back full-time, the returning stat teacher gets her stat class back (albeit much, much smaller since her absence spanned the semester break at which time many stat students dropped), and the stat-teacher's full-time substitute, who was teaching the stat teacher's geometry classes every day but not the stat class but who rather graded geometry papers and entered grades in the stat classroom while I taught the stat class while the department head taught my precal class while the original stat teacher was at home spending deserving, quality time with her newborn daughter, in the house, that incidentally, Jack built . . . I forgot where I was going with this.

Anyway, the smell of spring is in the air, even if we're smelling it outside with our winter coats on, prepared on any given night to still leave our hose-bibs dripping outside during a flash-Texas-overnight freeze. Everything is being reborn and coming out of the winter dormancy (if you're St. Augustine grass or Crepe Myrtles), hibernation (if you're a bear or a lazy math student), of the doldrums (if you're a wind north of the equator of prone to the blaaaahs). There are only 3 very busy and exciting months left in the school year, during which softball and baseball seasons must be played, getting ready for AP exams must be gotten, Swine Flu must be avoided, Prom dates must be finalized, banquets much be planned, and seniors begin to feel both the excitement of graduation and the nervousness that comes with the reality that they will be leaving their household to enter college--the first step into the unforgiving dog-eat-dog world. It's also a time for teachers to dig in their heels and pull each and every student across the finish line. Without the stat class, there are just fewer people for me to have to pull across that line.

Not that I'm not strong enough to do it, I just need all my strength to finish writing all those letters of recommendations.

It's time to step up and spring forward (almost, officially, it's 2 a.m. on March 14, 2010).