One more month of high school. Then graduation for the seniors and grades for everybody and a workshop for me to teach and a workshop for me to attend. Sleeping in. Straightening my office and back studio. Putting in a new sliding glass door and some windows...? Money? Who knows.

Preparing for next fall's new classes. I have reading to do, both literature for teaching and teaching materials to help me figure out how to do this. Although now, at the end of fulltime year number two, I am feeling much more confident about my job and my abilities. I think back to a few of the things I tried in those first weeks and months and I just cringe. I knew going into this that high school students would not want to know the story of my life, but I still tried to give them little glimpses into the wonderfulness of me and I really, really wish I hadn't. Oh well.

Live and learn.

We're currently working on poetry with the juniors and seniors, and I am enjoying it quite a bit. It's a chance for me to share my favorites. Why are teenagers so resistant to studying poetry? Is it because they think they won't know a synecdoche when it presents itself? I didn't know what that was until I started teaching last year. Or maybe it was this year. I don't think it's all that important, really, but I do think it behooves me to teach them that there is this term and they ought to have a sense of it. They all do know what a metaphor is. The junior boys like poems about war and soldiering but not about depression or insanity. The fewer girls are more open to whatever.

I have too much work to do, plus I'm trying to figure out how to create a slide show of the seniors with their baby pictures and I've never done it before. I could send this out to be done, but it would cost some hundred or two of dollars, and we don't have tons of extra money to spend. I had one student who offered to do it then backed out, and no one else has come forward. The kids I teach are generally well off and technologically connected, but they are not into creating projects electonically. At least not this class, which surprises me. Oh well again.