Last night, I went to the Meet the Teacher night for James. James's teacher also had Benjamin and Elias and I think she is absolutely wonderful, so there will be no problems there, I am sure. She has referred James for a fine and gross motor skills evaluation though, and I am not very surprised. James doesn't seem to be able to look you in the face when you are talking to him, and his handwriting is horrendous. I actually think it has deteriorated. Ah well, we will have to see how it goes after the screening.

Ron and I got home from Andy's back to school night and asked Andy to show us his Communication Journal. This is a book that is sold by the school ($5) and is a required accessory for each student. They are supposed to go into class each day and immediately write down their homework assignment and the agenda for the day. Then the teacher also writes in it and asks the parents to sign that they have seen something like a test score or something like that. Since the third day of school, Ron has been picking Andy up in the afternoon and taking him back to his work where Andy hangs out in the conference room and does his homework uninterrupted. Then he usually has a book or something to keep him occupied until Ron is ready to go home. I never told Ron that he had to look at the Communication Journal. So we got home the other night and asked to see it. I am looking through the thing and I see a line with Ron's signature on it. I ask him if he signed it. He said no. I asked Andy if he signed Ron's name. He said no. I asked him again, and the total hysteria commenced. Andy went completely off the deep end -- crying and snotty and all kinds of mess all over the place. He said that his classics teacher was yelling at him about not getting the signature and just so she would stop yelling at him, he wrote Ron's name (with a lower case "r" by the way). We went through the rest of the journal and signed everything off that we had missed and calmed Andy down. We also talked to Andy about NEVER doing that again EVER. Now. I am all set on this issue, but if the classics teacher yells at him again, I am going to rip her face off.

I started teaching today!!! I wasn't totally nervous until I was walking into the classroom, and then my stomach was jiggling around like jell-o, and I know my voice was a little bit ragged at first. However, I just jumped right in and started talking about what the class was about and how it was going to run. I went through each thing on the syllabus and told them why it was on the syllabus and why it was important (just a little bit -- have to save the big stuff for when we are actually reading the stuff). I told them that I was going to call them by their last names and explained that that was how things were done at St. John's College of Annapolis where I had taken my degree and I felt that it was important to behave respectfully in the classroom at all times and part of that was using last names. I also told them that I wanted each person to bring in a question about the reading every single day. If they don't do that, I will have to get medieval on them and start giving them a quiz every day and it was going to be a nasty evil quiz where I quoted a line and they had to tell me which act and which scene this line was from and why it was important. I really don't want to do that, so I told them straight out -- I don't want to do that, so please bring me a question every single day.

I told them that we were reading things that were just wonderful and that there was a lot of sex and big ideas (I am betting they stopped listening at "sex") and that the period we were starting with laid the foundation for who we currently are as a society. I made jokes a few times and some of them actually laughed! I found this reassuring since I was worrying that no one would get the jokes in Tartuffe! I talked for about an hour straight, except for a couple of questions from the woman in the way back of the room. Thank GOD I wrote notes down! I did manage to remember way more than I thought I would though. All in all it was fantastic, and even though I was sweating buckets under my jacket, I think it went well and they will be interested in what is going to happen in the class. Whoohooo!!!!