So today has been a long day of considering the future, beginning with visiting my old assistant principal in his new but temporary digs and so plotting the next few years--it was good to see him and his Mekhi Pfifer insousiance and to see what is still possible in an authoritarian principal-centered regime--the next few years will be that experiment in whether truly a school can be teacher-centered and what that all means.

Meanwhile, my new vision for years from now is not some Math-Science-Technology theme school as are popping up all over the place, but rather for a Rhetoric High School, which is more in the super-classical sense, where rhetoric is also a means for analyzing arguments, discovering arguments, thinking logically, persuading, and so on, as most closely tied to English and Social Studies, all as the foundation for a political awareness and communicative efficacy now more sorely lacking than math. I am also going to quote a large chunk of Aristotle when Joephet isn't pestering me to get to bed as much as he is now. It'll be relevant, surely enough.

So beyond that it was the grading of a ludicrously-easy Regents, proctoring a Global History exam in which the students tended to walk out very early and without having even written a single essay in some cases (in which case failure is guaranteed), in which the Far East was more than adequately represented, quantity-wise, at least. It's all rather depressing, to see this disconnect from lived life and the past, where what really matters are the exegetical and context skills, and the writing skills. Hence, Rhetoric High. It didn't help that the interview for a possible replacement was rather drab and unenergetic--it could have been much worse, but it's shades of my would-be-co-worker at my first school who part-timed as a comedian with PowerPoint dating presentations. Middle-aged computery Jewish men with sudden consciences are a motif in my life.

Also, from about a week ago, Joephet: "If I were a girl, I'd so be pregnant by now. It's just my personality!!"