And we're off!

Freshman day today. I think it's going to be a good year. It's a little strange, though. It's weird getting back into the swing of things with freshmen. We had some planning time during the department meeting today, and I had a few of those "Oh yeah! I have to teach them that, don't I?" moments, especially around the 11-sentence paragraph and the five paragraph essay... with having sophomores last year, I'd forgotten that I had to teach that material again. Woops... ha ha!

I'm already proud of one achievement. One of my colleagues was initially dead set against blogging with her students, and after talking with her, I have been able to get her to at least think about doing it, and has agreed to let me sit down and show her. I'm really excited to show her how to do it: I really enjoy this type of thing, and she's a good teacher, so I'm looking forward to giving her one more tool to use with her students.

First full day tomorrow. I didn't get through everything today, so I have that to do already, plus the things I wanted to do tomorrow.

In another "Oh wow" moment. I was talking with one of my classes about how fast high school flies, and did a quick demonstration on the board. We figured out that a high school student only actually has about 720 school days in his or her high school career. We subtracted one day for the day that we were finishing up, leaving them with 719 days left. A few of the students had a "Wow, that's not a lot of time, and we've already lost a day" reaction. (And so did I.)

Something like that only increases my sense of urgency. Only 720 days, and then they are done. It's absolutely amazing that we get as far as we do considering how little time we have.

Time to plan for tomorrow.