This
Journal

October
1999

Things are kind of hectic at the end of my first grading period here at the new school. The very comfortable routines of the old place are nowhere in sight. When you drive the same road over and over, you get to know every bend and bump. Here, it's one quick save after another.

For one thing, I'm still trying to configure my grade program here on the iMac, setting grade scales and grades symbols, entering student data and grades for particular assignments. The school's system is Windows-based. The grade program claims to be able to travel across platforms...but it don't...yet...as far as I can work it...

It doesn't help that I've got the usual crush of reading response notebooks. And that I've got a little mountain of "other stuff" to cope with (the least of which is LAUNDRY). And that students here are no more or less neurotic than students back there about wanting and needing their grades tallied right here and right now. (Whatever happened to "read 'em and weep" when the report cards show up in the mail?) I honestly shrug, "Sorry... the computer..."

And, after this roughly four day weekend, the little critters were only dense as dolomitic limestone (which, as your local geologist can tell you, is not that bad, all things considered). Not so dense as granite, but dense enough. A few of them were trying to convince me that cowboys out on the open range are a southern phenomenon.

So now dinner is done, and the coffee is steaming over there beyond the keyboard, and I'm thinking good thoughts about my students, getting ready for A's all around.

He who wishes to teach us a truth should not tell it to us, but simply suggest it with a brief gesture, a gesture which starts an ideal trajectory in the air along which we glide until we find ourselves at the feet of the new truth.
José Ortega y Gasset