Recent School Events

Tonight was the second of two nights of spring parent/teacher conferences. I always enjoy conferences, and I think parents enjoy talking to me about how their children are doing, even if the news isn't all good. Many parents come already knowing a lot, anyway, since I e-mail out my students' grades very regularly, and many parents are on my e-mail list for their kids' grades, too. The spring conferences are always more lightly attended than the fall ones, probably for a number of reasons. However, this year's spring conferences had SO FEW parents, at least at my table. I had LOTS of time to visit with those who did stop by--usually about topics not even related to their children!

After school today I had my first meeting with teachers and administrators from all the buildings in our district on the Web site committee. A public relations committee was recently formed, and one of their concerns is our school Web site (last updated April 20, 2005!!). I am one of two teachers who will be trained to create pages for our building. The more people talked, the more it became apparent that we would probably be expected to update the site daily and, at a minimum, weekly. This is in addition to all our other duties, and it is strictly volunteer. And it has the potential to grow exponentially in responsibility as more teachers start to make use of our services and ask to have more things on the high school's Web site and to have it updated more and more often. What have I gotten myself into?! On the other hand, it will be a chance to get to know better Jacki Kliner, a new business teacher on our staff; she's the other high school teacher on the committee.

On Sunday I saw our school's spring play, The Boardinghouse directed by Ben Klipfel. It was short--less than one hour! It was also a little crazy . . . about crazy people, yes, but the characters were mostly cross-gender cast due to limited numbers of the right sex for each role, so some lines just didn't feel right; I could tell they were supposed to be said by someone of the opposite sex. Attendance was really, really poor. Friday night, there were 70-some; Saturday night, 40-some; and Sunday, 24. But I got to visit with some fun alumni after the show, so that was good.