Bouquets of freshly sharpened pencils...

Ah, school days. The stain of marker-dust on my fingers and clothes. The piles of signed disclosure documents to alphabetize and file. And... the whap of a hand slamming a volleyball into the floor?

I spent two hours after school today in the gym running offensive stats on the volleyball team. It is TOUGH. Seriously. (Moreso right now because of course the girls aren't wearing uniforms at practice, so there aren't numbers to go by, and I don't know all of their names very well yet.)

It just goes SO fast.

It seems like the sport that would be simple to stat for would be football-- there's so much more down time between plays. (Of course it doesn't help that during practice I'm actually keeping track of girls on both teams... and on top of that the coaches throw in "free balls" every other rally in order to make sure there isn't any wasted practice time.) (Normally during a game the server takes a bit of time to serve. The "free balls" make it so that those "thirty seconds" or so are only possible every *other* time someone ends a rally.)

I was just practicing today (normally the assistant coaches stat the practices), but the scary part is that there are actually a bunch of other things I'm supposed to be keeping track of at the same time! (But of course not for both teams, since in a real game all of our girls are on the same team.)

I downloaded the NCAA Volleyball Statistician's Manual over the weekend, and have been reading it. Luckily it includes different scenarios for all of the major stats. ("Blue-player-one attacks the ball, but white-player-one blocks it. If blue-player-two keeps the ball in play (off the block), this is NOT counted as a dig. It is merely a put-back, because it is played off the block, not the attack." Blue-player-one receives a zero-attack, white-player-one receives a solo-block.)

(The really scary thing is that I made that example up off the top of my head... yet I think it is totally valid.) (Which gives you the impression that I actually know what I'm doing... yet that is totally not true!!) I could probably pass a written test on it, but being good at "book learning" means nothing when the ball is flying back and forth ten times too fast for me to know which three people on a side just touched it or which side of the net it fell on. Additionally, if I look down for a second to award something to one player three other players do something before I look back up!

So basically, it is insane.
(And there is so much vocabulary to learn!)
(They say it gets easier with practice. We shall see!)

Despite everything I just wrote, I spent the *majority* of my day in my classroom teaching science. ;) (But I did volleyball practice more recently, which is why it's on my mind.) My classes look okay. Too big, of course. (35 students per period.) But okay otherwise.

My AP class is small (AGAIN) but I heard from two kids today who are (allegedly) transferring in at this point. We'll see how that goes. I think that would get us up to 25.

Last year only 10 kids ended up taking the exam. (BOOO!!)
But as usual I am sort of forced to be glad the others didn't take it, since they were completely unprepared. (Not that I didn't try to force them to prepare.)

In other school news, I had my beginning-of-year-interview with the principal this morning, and in addition to goals for myself, I gave him had five goals for the administrators. :)

The first one was "Go into a different student restroom each day (all the way into a stall-- not just to the sink area) and if it is not clean, take action!" Heh. (We have had a SERIOUS decline in school cleanliness the past two years. It is a source of frustration to me.

My last one was "Use spell-check. Proofread your emails before you hit send." He was definitely taken aback by that one. I told him that I wasn't insinuating that any particular admin is a common culprit, but that it is one of the things teachers talk about with great frustration. Even if it is an email only to people within the building... it is just embarrassing. We are in the business of education, after all. Let's try harder.

I also told him about the "Cursive Lisence" certificate one of my nieces received from a teacher last spring (and how frustrating it is to try to defend public education to family members in the face of that kind of thing).