As the college football season descends into chaos, the subject of playoffs is again coming up. Which, as many of you know, I oppose. One of the main reasons for that opposition is that playoffs can render regular seasons moot.

Long before I took this stance, I got an object lesson in this. A particularly absurd one. This is more a telling of a story than a post about the BCS. I said almost all I have to say about college football playoffs here.

I am not a particularly athletic person. But there are two things to keep in mind: I started playing little league from a very young age. And I was pretty good at baseball. On the first point, it meant that while I didn’t have a whole lot of talent at sports like basketball or soccer, I was at least considerably more practiced than most. So when we played these things in PE, I was actually an asset to anyone willing to overlook that I was fat.

When it came to basketball, the “team leader” – Donnie – was not particularly willing to overlook that even despite the fact that I was 6’0″ tall in the 8th grade. There were six to a team and he had me swapping in and out for the 5th spot only because everybody had to play. One time we had six and the other team had four and I played for the opposing team and did remarkably well. It didn’t matter, though. I was not very athletic-looking. Our team came in second place (of six) overall, though. First and second place won a week of free time (fifth and sixth had a week of running laps).

After basketball came softball. This time there were only two teams. Donnie was one of the team captains. The other was Cory. Cory was on my little league team. Because he – like myself – was plugged in to the local little league, he knew who was good and who was not. So while Donnie was picking the jock-types, Cory was picking people he knew to be good. Donnie actually chuckled when I was Cory’s third pick, Cory, for his part, said he actually would have picked me sooner – as I was the best hitter on our little league team – but he knew he could wait for me. We both agreed he should have waited longer since it was apparent Donnie wasn’t going to pick me any time soon.

We destoyed them. Day after day, game after game. There were a lot of games because the mercy rule was called into effect regularly and we started over. Every now and again they would get lucky. We won 15 and they won twice. On the last day, the coaches announced it was the last day and that we were playing a “championship game.” And wouldn’t you know it, they won their third game that day. The end result? They had a week of free time and we had a week of running laps*.

What stood out to me was that nobody thought there was anything wrong with this. So hardwired into our thinking that a playoff is how champions are determined, that this seemed perfectly fair to everybody involved. We’d had a playoff for basketball, hadn’t we? Well yes, because there were six teams, two of which had tied for first and a third was only one game back. This, on the other hand, was essentially stating that the first 17 games were scrimmages.

* – I say a week, but it was probably only a couple of days. The 15-2 record I am more sure about. If I’m off, it’s not by more than a game or two in either direction. I know they won no more than three games. I know we won no less than 13.

Such is The Atlantic’s solution to the problem of bullying:

Instead of asking why bullies bully, scientists led by University of Illinois psychology professor Karen D. Rudolph are beefing up the coping side of bullying research by looking into why victims retaliate, ignore, or repair relationships after an attack. Through a series of surveys to 373 second-graders and their teachers, they investigated how each child approached and valued his or her peer relationships, how many of the children had been bullied, and how they responded to such attacks.

The data was revelatory. Though it wasn’t astounding to find out that half of the children reported being the object of taunts, gossip, or intimidation, how they reacted to their harassers was. The key to anticipating victims’ responses, it turns out, is to figure out their motivations for interacting with their peers in the first place. That is, kids who wanted to be popular and feel superior tended to retaliate impulsively. Those who wanted to appear cool by avoiding criticisms were more likely to pretend like nothing happened. And those who were genuinely interested in fostering friendships tended to react in healthful, positive ways. They asked their teacher for advice, sought emotional support, and found means to solve the tension with those who harassed them.

From a moral perspective, it is, of course, beyond agitating that we put the burden on the bullied to smart their way out of the situation. Of course, as I’ve said in the past, there is a certain logic to it. After all, it’s the victims that care what’s happening. It’s the victims that agree with society as a whole that bullying is a bad thing. It’s not, of course, the bullies themselves.

And there are some truths to this. While some people will get bullied no matter what, there are different ways to cope with it and some are more productive than others. There were three things that worked for me, two of which involved changes on my part and the third a system change at the school district.

If we look at the public school popularity echelon as we look at economics, I was a low-class kid. One thing that improved my situation was making middle class friends. The more of those I had, the less of a target I was. Middle class folks have at least some upper class friends, and the bullies to some extent watch themselves. The more you surround yourself with people that the bullies don’t want to get into it with, the more they will target people that are alone or that associate in target-rich environments. Of course, this was a negative-sum approach. Being less a target than the next guy doesn’t help the whole. Unless you become middle class yourself and lend aid to lower class people. I did this a little, though not much.

The second thing I did was crass bribery, which no school would recommend but which worked for me. Instead of giving away money, I helped a couple of bullies with their homework. On the first order they stopped picking on me and even became friends of sorts, but on a second order they provided a degree of implicit protection. They never threatened other bullies, but so long as I was on friendly terms with the former bullies, the others started avoiding me. Unlike the previous, this actually may have been positive-sum. Not only did the bullies I bribed not go after me, they also stopped going after my friends. And I think there was a net gain. (My friends didn’t receive the second-order effects that I did, however.) It was this that got me through my eighth grade year.

The third change was a systems one, and I believe a positive net gain. I changed schools, from a relatively unwealthy middle school to a wealthy high school. The bullies were vastly outnumbered, and made smaller by the fact that the worst were shipped off to the alternative school. I hated my high school, but it was great in this respect. It provided me enough breathing room that I could at first be invisible, and then start making middle class friends.

My experience in substituting has reinforced the notion that dealing with bullies – at least from an institutional standpoint – is exceptionally hard. Even for teachers and administrators that mean well. Last spring I mentioned a story at Pitts Elementary where two kids got into a fight, of sorts, and when the detention slips were sent out one of the kids was crying and the other was showing it off to all of his friends. How, precisely, do you punish a kid who shows off his punishment slips to all of his friends?

I don’t even know where to begin.

The method of discipline involved moving magnets up and down a spectrum (up for good, down for bad). The hassle this caused cost me 20 minutes in the morning and then another 15 during spelling time. At first, kids were being “helpful” by moving magnets up and down based on whether their classmates were doing good. This was followed by kids moving up their own magnets. Tattling is always a headache, but this just formalized it. Worse, the more I had to monitor that, the less I could monitor the classroom, all of whom were on the play carpet supposed to be reading. But they weren’t reading, therefore more magnets were being moved.

Then there was the pencil-sharpening debacle, another 15 minutes. Everybody in the whole daggun class had an unsharpened pencil. The bickering at the pencil sharpener meant that I had to just sharpen them myself. At some point, I am pretty sure kids were just breaking their pencils because the sharpener was where the action was.

Elementary school kids are actually generally quite good about participating. Particularly when it comes to the Direct Instruction stuff because they love yelling out the repeat-after-me’s. From a teaching perspective, I don’t like DI because it just feels stupid and rote, though ideologically I don’t have a problem with it because it’s really supposed to work. But I could barely get half of the class involved.

Early grade schoolers are also surprisingly good about ceding to authority, generally speaking, but I was almost at the point where I was just going to pick up the kids and physically put them at their desks. Except for the degree of trouble it would have gotten me in.

Apparently yesterday there was a big thing about bullying, so accusations of bullying were flying everywhere. About a half-dozen kids all just left after lunch to go to the principal/counselor/nurse. I had to get the other teacher involved to straighten that all out.

There was one case of bullying that I almost had nailed. The kids were playing dodgeball and a kid was crying on the ground due to some other kid’s “unfair” balltoss. I didn’t see that, but the kid he was pointing at then proceeded to throw the dodgeball straight at his head while he was one the ground. The crying kid ran away. When I finally found him, he refused to identify the kid that did it. I would have come down on the bully anyway, but it was one of three kids (all with shaggy blond hair, all wearing NFL-logo jackets) and I wasn’t positive which one it was. I needed the bullied to point him out and he refused to do so.

Speaking of which, dodgeball really is a mixed blessing. I am strangely happy to see it, but it does involve a lot of injuries and a lot of crying. With the exception of the above, the crying tends to be temporary.

One kid is so excitable that they have to put her in a jacket lined with metal to keep her from running around everywhere.

One little girl (actually, one of the good ones) got a papercut. I basically told her to tough it up (I couldn’t see the cut, no matter how hard I tried). Five minutes later she was bawling. So off to the nurse she went. After which, other kids started trying to injure themselves so that they could go to the nurse, too.

I actually had a frame of reference here. One of the girls in this first grade class was in the first grade class I taught at “the good school” (Rushmore). She was held back for a questionable reason: she was doing fine, but her Irish Twin needed to be held back and so the parents held them both back to keep them together. The difference in behavior between first graders and second graders is negligible and favorable to the former, so she wasn’t an outstanding student because she was more “mature” than her classmates. She was just a diamond in the rough. At Rushmore, she was a middle of the pack student that I really only remembered because she would keep hugging me. So in the context of Rushmore, she was average. In the context here, she was far and away the best student I had. Only one other came close.

I found it noteworthy that all three of the students I was “warned” about by the other teacher were male. The worst offenders were almost all female (one of the three she pointed to were an exception).

I’m going to have to come up with some better classroom management strategies. Not all of my grade school assignments are going to be at Creston and Rushmore.

I’ve taught previously at this school, Church Elementary, with a couple of pretty decent classes.

Notably, however, when I was last at Rushmore, one of my students was the daughter of Church’s principal.

“The main thing is to keep them from killing each other. If they learn something along the way, even better.” -The other first grade teacher.

I got an assignment at Rushmore elementary yesterday. Rushmore is far and away the best school in Redstone. The test scores say as much, but even before I saw them I singled out that school as having an absurdly positively atmosphere. I was glad to get the assignment because I had feared that I had been blackballed there after this whole incident (which, by the way, actually worked out in my favor: I got paid for one 1.5 days because of a mistake on their part).

It was my third straight assignment for the third grade, oddly enough.

One of the girls was 4’8″. In the third grade. I wonder if the high school girl’s basketball coach already knows her name. Speaking of which, last year I had a middle school student whose gender I was uncomfortably unsure of until I saw that she was on the girl’s basketball team. She was approaching 6’0″. As for Miss 54″, she commented that her father and brothers were “very tall” so I doubt that it’s just an odd growth spurt. She also didn’t seem like the kind of kid to be held back unless she was close to the borderline.

With the exception of a couple, every time I teach below the 5th grade, I am informed that I am a very tall individual and/or I have very large feet. This time I was informed that I was a very tall individual. One of the boys was bragging to another of the boys that at least they came up to my beltline.

I finally met Mrs. Truman. For those of you who do not recall, my actual last name is less common than “Truman” and so it’s odd to have someone with my same last name. And any time I teach at the middle school, I am asked if there is any relation. This time I made a point of stopping by to introduce myself. I know that she knew of my existence because she accidentally got my Valentine’s Day bag when I left it behind. I was… kind of disappointed in her, actually. She had very dyed and very dried hair. She was very friendly to me and we had a laugh about the event of the previous year, but given all of the raves I’d heard about her, I figured she would remind me of a third grade teacher I liked rather than the one that I hated.

I commented that any time I am asked about her among middle school kids I am told that she is/was “totally awesome” and that I might have benefited from the association. She appreciated the compliment and said that it would probably be different in high school, though, because her husband is a parole officer and “a lot of kids at Redstone High School have to deal with him.”

With the exception of the last name and the Valentine’s Day incident, I wouldn’t have expected her to know anything about me, but she actually knew that I am that guy that drives out all the way from Callie. The principal stopped by and said hello and asked if I was still making that drive. That seems to be my role. The guy who makes that really long drive. It also makes me wonder if, while I haven’t been blacklisted, they still think of me as iffy because of the whole incident over six months ago. He was nice, though.

The principal is very popular. Which is not surprising, since he either has the plum job or is actually so good that Rushmore’s impressiveness is attributable to him. I guess I have been watching too many crime shows, because when I think of a popular male principal, a part of my mind thinks that we’re going to discover that he’s kept a 15 year old girl chained up in his basement for five years or something equally harrowing.

The day was largely uneventful. Getting third graders to be quiet is a challenge. At the bad schools, it’s to get them to stop talking to one another. The only blow-up we had today was actually over academics. They all swore that the answer key was wrong about something and just blew up about it, requiring the other third grade teacher to come over.

The thing I’ve learned about elementary school kids is that they love routine – at least in school. They are very good at pointing out if you are doing anything that is not according to the routine and The Way Things Are Supposed To Be. No matter how minor.

Teachers have cooler gadgets than I was in school. We had blackboards and later overhead projectors. They have “smartboards.”

Rushmore used to be an “open classroom” environment. This was a hippie venture where they didn’t have separate rooms for everybody but instead taught everything in a wide open area with different sections. This adventure did not last long. But you can see the layout is not that of a typical school. The big open area in the middle still exists and the classrooms shuffled off to the side. They added new classrooms over the summer, though, so it almost looks traditional, though the layout still looks odd. It feels like somebody emptied out a department store and put in a school.

For all of the praises I sing to the school, it’s actually most known for a student-on-student shooting that happened there a long time back.

I really, really meant to take some pictures of the anti-bullying and positive mental attitude posters in the classroom. One of them had a picture of Alice (from the Brady Bunch) and ALF, saying that you want to be like the former but not like the latter. Putting aside that these kids probably don’t know who Alice and ALF are, who wouldn’t rather be ALF? Almost all of the anti-bullying stuff puts the onus on the bullied to extricate himself from the situation or “talk it out.” No surprise there, but one of the posters involving frogs managed to sum up the attitude very neatly.

Kay Steiger sounds off the warning bells with regard to online college:

Via the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, a new study confirms some earlier findings about the efficacy of online learning in two-year colleges. The study, conduced by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, looked at more than 50,000 students in Washington state’s community or technical college system. What they found was that students who load up on online classes, especially early in their higher education careers, are less likely to finish their degrees. This is worrisome, especially because, as CCRC notes in its report, the number of students taking online courses is only increasing.

Other commentary has pointed out that online learning requires a basic degree of computer know-how that a lot of people don’t have and that online learning requires a level of discipline that traditional learning doesn’t. These are both very valid points and two of the three main reasons why online education will never become a norm (even as computer know-how increases). But there is something else at work, which Steiger points out: online students are not the same as physical students in terms of student profiles.

The Atlantic has been raising the banner of the non-traditional student. This is part of the “problem,” if you view it as such. Non-traditional students returning to school may be a good thing, but they’re often going to be the most marginal students. Not because they’re lazy or dumb, but because they have a lot of other things going on. That’s precisely what attracts them to the flexibility of online learning in the first place. This is also one of the reasons that for-profit universities have such abysmal graduation rates. They cater to precisely these students.

When we talk about increasing college enrollment, this is one of the things that we have to be looking at. We’d partially be bringing into the fold a lot of people who are not, at present, in a great position to do well in school. It may be worth bringing them into the fold anyway! But we have to accept that one of the costs of this is going to be higher drop-out rates and at least some students potentially hurt along the way with debt but no degree. Unless we’re going to start paying people to go to college, we have to factor this into the equation.

This is something that brick-and-mortar universities themselves often look at. One university near where I live is trying like hell to make the transition away from being a commuter school that provides the opportunity for a great education to people without a lot of options in favor of being a more traditional university. Why? Because a lot of these students are failing out. This hurts the university’s profile by making it look like a school that is failing. But by changing the student body to a more traditional one, the hope is that the numbers will improve and the university will look better. The only sacrifice required is shuffling off the “wrong” people to schools that are less good.

And on a personal level, I grit my teeth when I hear people talking about how they want their kids to “work their way through college.” Presumably so that they won’t take it for granted. There may be something to this, though in my experience working while going to college is more often going to be a recipe for failure. A working student serves two masters. My ex-girlfriend, an honors student in high school, failed miserably in college due in no small part to the fact that she was working at a pet store the whole time. Could she have done both if she were more disciplined? Sure. But that’s the kind of disciplined student you don’t have to worry about in the first place. Meanwhile, my own GPA fell considerably when I started working while attending. It’s a serious distraction. Some people have no choice. But putting kids in that situation for the sake of making a point or thinking it will lead to better outcomes is mistaken.

One of the “no duh” things I have learned while substitute teaching is the extraordinary difference in time horizons between young people and older people. I don’t mean this in the typical sense that kids can’t think too far ahead. I mean it in the broader sense… that what we would consider a little time is actually a whole lot of time for them.

One place where this comes up is with recess. Recess at Redstone elementary schools runs at about 10-15 minutes. To me, 10-15 really isn’t enough time to do anything. But to say that they are thrilled about it is an understatement. Not just as a break from the tedious monotony of classwork. In the same 10-15 minutes that isn’t “time enough to do anything” they just bounce from one activity to another. They play this for a couple minutes, then that. And sometimes they ask for an extra five minutes. Five minutes is a half or a third of the time that isn’t sufficient to do anything, but it just makes their day if you give it to them. Five minutes.

Recess more generally is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it’s good for kids to be able to go out and play. I have become a believer that recess should not be considered a reward but rather a good thing in its own right. I didn’t used to really believe this all that much because back when I was in elementary school, we spent recess doing things other than running around as often as not. But judging by the Redstone kids, we are the exception. Or maybe it was related to the fact that we had PE almost every day and they get it once or twice a week.

On the other hand, as a substitute, that 10-15 minutes out of an 8-hour day (including lunch) tends to be the cause of about a half or a third of the major problems I’ve faced. A good portion of the time when they come back in, I hear stories about how so-and-so hit so-and-so. How it may have been an accident but the retaliation was real. And the bad blood from the playground can color the atmosphere for the rest of the day.

I had my first two substituting assignments last week. Both involved the third grade.

It’s always a good sign when you’re substituting for a male teacher. That’s because he’s usually a coach. And coaches, at least in Redstone, really have the plum jobs. Something to justify their salary and little more. It was frequently the case in my district that they taught the most basic of subjects, but in Redstone it’s not even that.

The time when I was teaching at the alternative school and had six students over three periods? Coach!

The time when I was doing a votech class on “workforce studies”? Coach!

And last week, it was “library tech.” Computer class! Coach!

The main thing was to avoid being bored while they listened to their headsets and learned to type using some free web site involving animated rhinos. The teacher (coach) said all I had to do was prevent them from talking and make sure that their posture was good. He was very concerned about their posture. When he left, he yelled “Posture!” and everybody sat up straight.

At the end of the day, I got to tell a teacher that her students were very well behaved in computer lab. I like getting to tell teachers that their classes were good.

I met the principal at this school (the last one I hadn’t substituted at before, I’m pretty sure), and this time not for a bad reason (it’s typically not good when a principal knows who you, a substitute teacher, are). We had lunchroom duty at the same time. I told a couple kids to stop running and he said “Actually, let them run. They fall, they hurt themselves, they are more careful about running in the future.” I’m not sold on the school itself (though the building itself is awesome), but I respect the attitude. On the other hand, during my off-period I was walking out to my car and a bunch of first graders were playing outside on a lawn near the parking lot with a huge hill unattended. I can think of 100 ways for something to go wrong with that.

There is a story in the background on all of this I cannot divulge because it actually got national news coverage and would give away my location. Frustrating.

The next day was a standard third grade class for a full day. It was at Creston, one of the “good schools.” The difference between a good school and a bad school is that (a) a good school you spend 50-75% of your time teaching or helping them learn and 25-50% of your time putting out fires and in a bad school you spend 50-75% of your time on classroom management, and (b) in a good school when you scream at the kids to be quiet, they do or at least try.

Things started breaking down towards the end of the day. The third grade is the first grade in which they have to stay all the way to 3:00 and the kids seemed to mentally check out at about 1, when they used to leave. I had to leave a less-than-stellar note for the teacher. She showed up before I left, however, and I talked to her about it in person. I told her that the kids weren’t bad, they just had trouble keeping quiet. She pounced on the latter part and said that she would give them a good talking-to.

It sort of feels like leaving reviews on eBay or the Subaru questionnaire where anything less than a perfect review is a bad review. It makes me almost want to say that they were perfect, because they were more good than bad.

My teaching experience is… limited. I’ll be the first to admit. Nonetheless, even substituting for a semester, there are some things you pick up on pretty quickly. Perhaps some of them are false-lessons to be unlearned later. But maybe not. In any event, I read “amen, brother!” when I read about a new style for teaching math:

Many students were sent to him because they had severe learning disabilities (a number have gone on to do university-level math). Mighton found that to be effective he often had to break things down into minute steps and assess each student’s understanding at each micro-level before moving on.

Take the example of positive and negative integers, which confuse many kids. Given a seemingly straightforward question like, “What is -7 + 5?”, many will end up guessing. One way to break it down, explains Mighton, would be to say: “Imagine you’re playing a game for money and you lost seven dollars and gained five. Don’t give me a number. Just tell me: Is that a good day or a bad day?”

Separating this step from the calculation makes it easier for kids to understand what the numbers mean. Teachers tell me that when they begin using Jump they are surprised to discover that what they were teaching as one step may contain as many as seven micro steps. Breaking things down this finely allows a teacher to identify the specific point at which a student may need help. “No step is too small to ignore,” Mighton says. “Math is like a ladder. If you miss a step, sometimes you can’t go on. And then you start losing your confidence and then the hierarchies develop. It’s all interconnected.”

This was precisely the problem I ran into when trying to teach a second grade girl to approximate and add. And this was how I finally got it through. You simply break it down into as many steps as humanly possible. I wanted to jump ahead straight to “Take 76, round it to 80, then take the 19, and round it to 20, and you get 100,” which was obviously too much. So I stepped back and said “What does 76 round to?” and she had no idea. So… another step back… the number that 76 rounds off to is going to be one of two numbers. Which ones?” and on to “What’s the first number in 76?” “7” Okay, so take that number, or the next number up, and those are the two possibilities. So what are the two possible numbers you might round 76 up to?” Her first guess was 78, but we got there until I destroyed her confidence.

I’m always skeptical of claims that “any kid can learn up to college level math,” which the article suggests. But I do believe that there is more variability than Half Sigma and the like think. At least there is where there’s motivation, which can be the bigger nut to crack.

The other thought is that this demonstrates the tremendous need for tracking. Take some second graders and try to start with “What’s the first number in 76”, they’re going to go absolutely crazy. This completely and entirely fails to bother some people, but perhaps due to my experiences it does bother me. And it’s a waste of their talent. The notion that “we shouldn’t worry about the really smart kids” because they’ll have the smarts to take care of themselves completely ignores the fact that it’s the smart kids that will be using their education to make this country better for the less smart ones. And while I may disagree with Sigma on the extent to which the left side of the bell curve can be taught, I am in full agreement that you have to approach different aptitudes differently. And just as you don’t want to throw the answers at second graders, like I tried to do, nor do you want to bore the quicker kids to death by starting at a point that is going to be intuitive for many.

The only non-school related aspect to this post: Most of the places I’ve lived, the fridge door is weighted to close with only moderate pressure. I’m not used to having to close the fridge door all the way. Just give it a shove and it closes itself. My parents’ fridge isn’t that way at all. I’m not sure why. It’s been a struggle to remember to close it.

I drove by my old middle and high school the other day. The high school apparently built a free-standing basketball gymnasium. I wonder if the old one is still there. Probably. It makes me angry, though not for the waste or anything like that. Rather, they took away what was already very limited parking to build that thing. Grumble. Understandable in its own way. Despite being in the football-mad south, I went to a “basketball school.” We cycled through football coaches all the time because they would come in expecting to be a Big Deal only to find that they were the #2 behind our legendary basketball coach (who the new gym, as well as the street in front of the school, is named for). The high school’s current coach is the son of a Division I basketball coach who made The Tourney last year.

Back when I was in middle school, I would occasionally miss the bus. The intermediate school forced you out within a half-hour of the bell and Mom wouldn’t come and pick me up until Jeopardy was over. So I’d have to go to the library, which I remember as being a long walk. It’s like right next door. Long walk? No wonder I was so fat.

A part of me would like to go inside and tour the facilities of both schools. And my elementary school, now that I think about it. But security and all that prevents anyone who is not a parent or a student from so much as using the parking lot to turn around. When I was in high school, I wanted to go to West Oak Elementary’s Open House in order to see the school again. But they wouldn’t let anyone who wasn’t a parent in. What the hell? Are they worried that I would kidnap and sexually abuse a parent? I find John Walsh’s America to be extremely aggravating.

Though it requires illegal parking (in an empty lot), I stop by the Southern Tech University campus just about every time I come to town. At least there I’m not a threat to anybody. I also stop by the book store to see if there’s anything new that I want. The jerseys were on sale for every size except mine.

Southern Tech’s expansion is pretty impressive. They almost have a livable area where you don’t have to drive through Scarytown in every direction to go somewhere to eat or hang out.

They’ve redistricted the schools, so my elementary school and my high school aren’t mine anymore. Or rather wouldn’t be my children’s if I moved into town. The elementary school is an upgrade, though the high school isn’t (from five stars to four). Really, though, most of my friends who went to Mayne High were miserable. Most of those who went to Southfield were content. The new Eastfield school (which is somehow west of Westfield – a story for another day) is more like Southfield. Wealthy enough to avoid being unpleasant, but not so wealthy as to be aggravating.

Aggravating, it would seem, is my word for the day. I’ve also been fighting off a headache.

There are two district stadia. The second is below the fold, at the bottom. The first is above, neatly nestled in town. Half of the bleachers actually sit atop parts of the school. This picture is from the special ed room, below said bleachers.

This is outside Lewis Elementary. Considering that Lewis is the worst school in the district, it fits. The school was, until somewhat recently, a middle school. Dwindling population lead to the decommissioning of an elementary school and Lewis’s conversion, sending all of the district kids to Clark Middle. (more…)