Those grueling two-day weeks

I know everyone's waiting to read my continuing saga of the New School Building (actually I know no such thing, but it sounds good), so here goes.

The biggest change in the "school life" seems to be the cafeteria and lunchroom. The room is beautiful- bright and spacious. It's a pleasure to be in there. And having actual food available for lunch has altered the way people come to school. I'm not sure if anyone anticipated how many people would want to buy their meals. The food is good, but what's more interesting is how everyone ends up in this nice room together at the same time. As much as the larger/split quarters is missing the intimacy of the old school, having a community gathering point helps to bring everyone together.

For the faculty, who have a nice little side area with booths reserved for them, it has turned out to be a great opportunity to spend time together. I've eaten lunch and talked at length with people I've never said more than "Hi" to in the past. It's such a nice thing that I actually have nothing snarky to say about it. Oh, wait. How about, we've gotten to spend so much time together that the topic of conversation has moved beyond "what route did you take to get here and how long did it take you?" There, that feels better. I actually did learn a better route from one of these conversations.

On other fronts, there's still plenty of discussion about how tight the classrooms are. The big thing, for the teachers at least, is the white boards. There's something not quite right about them. Not as far as the color is concerned. They're white. But certain markers, almost unpredictably, seem determined that their markings will live on forever. And the erasers that came with the boards do no such thing. This has led to the creation of a family of urban legends about what kinds of markers to use and how to erase them.

Some of the classrooms are not carpeted and have rolling chairs for the teachers. This is great fun. I can easily propel myself from one end of the room to the other, (I have a lot of practice from late night chair races back in my advertising days). I'm looking forward to developing a technique to draw full board-length parallel lines in Geometry.

On Friday I got all the way to the athletic building for a class without The Phantom Tollbooth and had to scurry back and fetch it. That's a long way to scurry.