Another Day in Ordinary Time

This past week, short though it was, seemed to careen onward like a student carrying a mound of books, laden down with three backpacks, a thermos of hot coffee, and car keys in his mouth that has been tripped at one end of a hallway and now struggles for the entire remaining length of the hall to regain balance and composure before crashing into the waiting glass door at the end. Naturally, the glass door is the weekend.

I stay home on Monday, I play catch up on Tuesday, my wife leaves for Washington with the car on Wednesday, I have a reception with the Archbishop of Newark in honor of my school on Thursday, and Friday... well, we've all seen me write about Friday before. To quote myself, "Friday is a very dangerous day." I spend the entire week seeking out rides to and from work from friends and colleagues, desperately trying to finish grades before the deadline (I finished in plenty of time), and trying to keep myself and my apartment afloat without my wife. I feel like an airline pilot who has to put his plane down somewhere -- and wouldn't you know it, the weekend conveniently arrives tomorrow.

My students were tested on the novel Silence today. They were impressed with the ending I seemed to feel, the simple expression of faith that many of them gave both in defense of Fr. Rodrigues and in condemnation of the apostate priest was, to say the least, very touching to me as their instructor. I have finally milked everything that I can out of Chapter 2 of the Religion book (well, everything that I can without turning the class into a course on the quintessence of faith) and Monday the Religion class will move on to Chapter 3, "Judaism: Discovering Our Religious Roots."

The Tuesday work group moved on with the lesson on Ancient Greece today. It was not the most exciting of lessons considering the best thing I could come up with for today was to go through several of the 10 key words on the back of the outline. I'm intending to spend much of the weekend planning what must be planned in order to move my students forward with Ancient Greece and into the Roman era, hopefully before we break for Christmas. I no longer have any hope of moving into the Dark Ages before Christmas, which is sad to say the least. I still have some hope of reaching the World Wars before we break for the summer, but I can't imagine reaching Charlamagne before the 1207th anniversary of his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor.

This coming Monday (and Tuesday for the Wednesday Group) I will be distributing new copies of my syllabus. I intend to restructure a few things in my class, including the concept of class participation and homework in an effort to play more toward my students' observed strengths while also holding them more accountable on homework. I intend to become stricter on late work (I'm canning my tiered late work policy) and I'm revamping my cheating policy (already draconian, I'm adding a few extra ideas that I received from the Christo Rey network). I'm shortening up the syllabus and I'm going to add a few visual things to make it slightly more accessible for my students. Will they read it? Well, I intend to pull off one of my old tricks and start the marking period off with yet another pop quiz on my syllabus. We'll see if they learned their lesson from last time.

And so ends another day in ordinary time.