Life is good, Dear Reader, but I'm a much busier person than my 15-hour school week would indicate. At home I've been using a little of my spare time looking for a second-shift job, but in the meantime am still collecting a portion of unemployment to supplement my meager teaching wages. A lot of my spare time over the past week has been in doing some three-dimensional trigonometry and some partial derivatives (calculus) in order to accurately depict my star charts when I relaunch the Wisconsin Skies portion of this website. Now I've a textbook to write... at least one.

It's an exciting time to be at The Academy. This morning Jody and Beth met with the architects for the new school when it's built. (Though The Academy is a secular school, right now they're leasing space in an unused Catholic school building.) I was shown a picture of the design of the facade of the building, and it was just beautiful... a two-story building with columns about the main entrance, and a fountain out front.

I don't mean to sound like an intellectual snob, but it is so refreshing to teach in a school where the "dumb kids" will be the ones who "only" make a C+ in the calculus, or where one doesn't get the same amount of high school credit toward graduation by taking a first class in auto repair or home ec versus a twelfth year of Latin or a tenth year of literature or a second year of the calculus.

Summer school plans are already being made, and I'm tentatively on the docket to teach computer fundamentals one day out of the week to K-2 students and the rest of the days a course in the history of mathematics to students in grades 3-9.

I absolutely loved my kids in Holmen. Oh, but the things I could have taught them with these people as administrators! No offense to my former students, but Holmen's so-called academic standards have now officially been blown out of the water. As if that in and of itself wasn't enough, there are no bullshit "inservice" days at The Academy. Grades only have to be turned in once each semester because parents here are already updated weekly about their kids' progress.

The administration of this school isn't all that's making me so happy with this job. I am already considered a major spoke in the wheels that will get these kids to college. I asked my eighth graders last week what college they'd hoped to attend. Nobody said Western Wisconsin Technical College. Nobody said UW-La Crosse. The least prestigious school mentioned was UCLA. Everyone else picked from the Ivy League, Oxford, or Cambridge.

Again, I mean no offense to my former students if any are reading this. Kids tend to rise to the level at which they're challenged, to meet the standards that are set. At Holmen, kids were taught to meet the entrance levels of WWTC. (Thank goodness a good number of them exceeded those expectations, and I was happy to inspire many of those who did.) But here? The sky isn't even the limit. For some reason I'm reminded of Jones' Law Number Four: Never lower your standards. The Academy certainly won't... and I won't either.