A bad case of the half-empties

Read the comments following any news article and it's enough to get depressed, and somehow I looked away for a minute, and we wound up bombing another country.

On the hyper-local level, since our economics teacher left, no one can imagine how to create a senior slide show, so it's left to me, or my two library aides, now the unwitting class historians. The slideshow has necessarily has a pictureof all three hundred graduates...

Yesterday, before the student body, I felt as if I (and not the teacher team) was routed by a student (note the singular) from our scholar's bowl team. Our teacher team competes in a local "bar-style" trivia tournament this Tuesday...

And that was before the tremendous attenuation in our poetry slam, where thirteen poets signed up, six submitted their poems, but only three turned up to read last night. 

We used to have much better-attended events, but I fear those are victim to teens' over-scheduling, building around the spring sports, the band trip, with students in Serbia. 

But why am I focusing on the negative? Those poems ran the gamut from sad to mad to romantic. There were tears and giggles, and it didn't drag on forever.

And I somehow can't believe it was just last Friday that I met a group of students to see Little Women (the first production of the musical in Alabama). In an unanticipated bonus, the female lead, a show-stealing Jo March, was a high school student from another school in our system.

Then, there was a too-quick trip to Washington to present at Computers in Libraries' Internet at Schools track, which pulled many people outside the purview of schools. I got to talk with people about re-thinking collections and ebooks, saw friends, and met some new people, many whose names I knew, and hopefully didn't embarrass myself too badly, but I do tend to mention that stretch in the airport on the way back instead of the cherry blossoms, or the Gauguin exhibit.

And, in a rare flash of rationality, a federal judge has held that banning payroll deductions for the state teacher's association is equivalent to viewpoint discrimination, and now the firefighters have agreed.

When I think about everything that has happened recently, it's no wonder I feel on the brink of exhaustion. We've two more weeks until out spring vacation, but tomorrow night, I will put on a suitably dark and severe dress and chaperone the prom, which is at the art museum this year instead of a hotel, which should preclude some of the anxieties which punctuated the event for me last year at the Westin. Seeing them all dressed up and shining is so heartening, but I will never attend another prom without thinking about how Ally Condie used school dances as inspiration for Matched.

So, I will wait until next week to try to figure out ways to limp through another year without any money to buy materials or replace our groaning computers, figure our how to martial my resources to get to the next thing, whatever that may be.