So this week I am writing down my ideas I though through while cutting the grass yesterday. I have found it very productive to cut the grass this year. I get some exercise (walk behind mower) I find it almost enjoyable and I tend to think creatively while mowing. I came up with several new story pieces for two of my books I am currently working on I also invented a back pack snorkel air reserve system for holding reserve air for short dives to the bottom.

This week I was thinking about how changes in my school specifically the rewrite to curriculum and the criteria based grading we are planning to implement. WE started by looking at standards, this led us to creating our own as we had some rather big difficulties with the ones the district wrote over the last several years. We then scrapped that as our department head went in a more general direction of looking at the 21st century skills direction. That work is all on hold now.

We developed a more long term goal of implementing the criteria based grading and curriculum writing which is now in jeopardy as well. In yesterday's meeting a very emotional Principal informed the staff of the cuts that had to be made to staffing for the upcoming school year. It is said to see highly professional motivated and passionate people let go or reassigned when there contribution is truly needed. Well we then split up into departments, mine is unfortunately only 3 people instead of 5 as was the case the last several years, though fortunately I am still one of the 3. I will have 7 preps next year and they have increased the student total to 600 students for the year. This will obviously impact our implementation plans as well as my teaching.

Sympathy please, I will teach 6th grade science, 7th grade science, Environmental, Chemistry, Anatomy and physiology, AP biology, AP chemistry.

I understand that as I have described our operation as a start up company we all have to pitch in to make sure we get established and weather the difficult times yet I feel a real disappointment that the numbers of students and preps may adversely effect the educational outcome. Frankly I am also disappointed as I will less time to improve my classes using some of what I have learned in this program.