It feels like I've been away a long time. As of this morning, I hadn't walked the Edison halls for over a week. Last week I was back East on business, then came down with some nasty bug, which has left me if not incapacitated than very sluggish this week. I stay home on Tuesday; I went in to Edison this morning with a vicious head cold and a sense of dread.
It wasn't until the middle of third period that I figured out what I was really dreading, and it wasn't the kids. I enjoy the kids. I adore the kids. They are funny and interesting and do the darndest things. What I was dreading was school, the whole schooliness of it, the drudgery and the humiliation, the endless lists of instructions, the adults yelling at the kids for not paying attention to things they don't care about--that I don't even care about. All the petty badgering and the hostility. It's grating, this schooling business, particularly so when I would rather have been curled up with a cup of tea and kleenex. The light was too bright and the floors were too polished and everything was just a little bit sanitized, hospitalesque.
Hospitals are like the worst places on earth to be sick. Maybe schools are worse. I don't know.
I don't have that much to say about what I saw at school today. I was feeling disconnected from the place, from the kids, from Laura. I left after lunch, my head ringing, my sinuses dammed.
In my absence a whole bunch of computers showed up, and so, gentle reader, you can look forward to hearing more about how we use these computers (I hope) to help the kids feel more engaged in the classroom, because if they are feeling anything like I'm feeling, then we need to inject a little energy--a little life--into this place.
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