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I noticed that it has been about 2 weeks since I wrote. Basically, my cold took longer to go away, and the first quarter end hit at the same time. I survived field day by doping myself up with cold medicine (I always wonder why it is called cold medicine since it does not help get rid of the cold; it just makes it possible to function at a low level without causing others to notice one's condition too much.). The day was supposed to be sunny, but it was overcast and breezy instead. I had taken my own advice by wearing layers which made the chill tolerable. Some of my homeroom, however, didn't take the advice as seriously as they should have. ... and what is it about teenage boys that they can go around in tee-shirts without jackets or sweatshirts or anything else and still claim not to be cold? The teachers all agreed that it was not wise to change the date of field day just because of a play. I hope that this mistake will not be repeated.

As I feared, my cold did not go away but hung on. The problem with a cold is the fact that it drains my energy. That's good for making sure that I get enough rest to get rid of it, but it wears on my teaching and non-teaching tasks. I struggled for the next 3 days to teach, to catch up with grading make up work, and to answer students' questions about their grades. Thankfully, on Friday (Halloween) there was no school so that faculty could get their grades done. They were due online by 8:15 Monday morning. I actually didn't spend long at the school since most of my work could be done on the internet. I had some problems with accessing my computer science students' programs, but other than that everything else was almost ready. I loaded up the needed programs and headed home after I got some help with my immediate problem.

I decided to defragment/pack my hard drive and install the compiler I needed so that I could grade my students' programs at home rather than at the school because it would be much easier for me. I messed up the download of the compiler somehow, spent much of the weekend trying to figure out what I had done/not done, and ended up downloading a different compiler so that I could finish grading the programs.

I zipped off to school on Monday, getting there 1 1/2 hours before the deadline to tweak the grades. In my math classes I always drop the lowest quiz grade and 1/10 of the homework grades at the end of the quarter, and I had not done that yet because of the time I used in trying to fix a problem that I never fixed. I was finished on time, though. This past week has been easier because the seniors were out on their required 1-week internship. I lost 2 classes completely for the week, had 3 classes with 6 or fewer students, and only had one class that had only 5 seniors (missing) to 18 juniors. That class (computer science) had videos about computers and science fiction all week.

I spent a lot of time at the school planning for my Honors Probability and Statistics class which is the only class that I had never taught until this year. I've learned over the years to keep my notes on my computer science and my functions and modeling classes intact so that I can start from them each year. I never really needed to keep notes from one year to the next when it came to teaching straightforward algebra, but functions and modeling is an applied mathematics class, so I need the notes for reference. The computer science notes I keep have to do with the programming language I use (Java) and not computer science itself, since I come from the world of private industry and computer programming and systems analysis ... plus I'm a computer science grad school dropout (not due to grades ... my grades were fine).

Thursday afternoon and evening and all day Friday were set aside for parent-teacher conferences, but I had very few of those. The teachers for the freshmen and sophomores get most of the conferences. I did get time to help another teacher change the format of her homework website from an icon-driven menu to a "frames" version, i.e. no icons. I am not sure what it is about English teachers, but most of them think it's important to look sophisticated. I guess most math teachers don't think that way because it is hard enough getting students to understand how necessary and useful math is so that they will actually want to learn. We tend not to be so distant in our own ways.

I am over my cold completely. I do find it hard to go back to my healthy way of life every time I get sick. I have not exercised for nearly 3 weeks, so I am having trouble convincing myself to start up again. I will do it, though. Likewise, I need to get back to blogging.