My kingdom for...some stability?

"My horse! My horse! My kingdom for a horse!"

Ah, if only my problems were concerned with horses and battlefields. I have decided that one of the major problems in the public education system is stability and routine. Me, the non-linear, discumbobulated, spastic thinker, an advocate of structure and rigidity? Alas, it has come to that.

When an entire class roster changes over 4 weeks, when new students arrive on a regular basis JUST so that they can cancel out their failing grade from the high school down the street, there is a problem. There is no continuity, no follow-through, and hardly any sense of permanancy in many of these kids' lives, so when there's no structure or logic to school either, it makes you want to go insane. I don't blame kids for being confused or rebellious in a place where they can't even decide if you're allowed to have CD players in the building or not! Where fire alarms go off no less than twice a day, followed ten minutes later by...

"Students and teachers please pardon this interruption: please ignore the alarms, we're doing some testing on the fire system"

Hell, I wish I had some stability in my own life. My current routine of sleeping 6 hours a night is non-functional one, and soccer is devouring every free moment of my time. Too bad that's the only part of school which makes me happy in any way. To compensate, I've been travelling a lot, which is nice, but doesn't really help solve the problem of getting things accomplished and implementing a logical structure to my existence.

I got to see a bit of autumn in Philadelphia, got a dose of that lovely 37 degree rain that makes you want to kill yourself at the end of first semester, and saw the golden afternoon shadows stretch out over soccer players on Walton Field. Went to Hot Soup only to discover that I'd fallen completely out of touch with the rhythm and logic of glassblowing, and it took me till the end of my time there to get back into that routine. Pretty depressing, but not a total loss.

I'm off to Seattle next weekend for the "Thanksgiving From Hell" [really, I'm trying to be optimistic], but at the moment I'm trying not to think about that.

What I *do* need to think about in my immediate future is the test I'm giving on Sherlock Holmes next Monday, my lesson plans for the week, and the 160+ progress reports that must be filled out by Thursday night.

Man, I've really got to get back into the swing of things.