February Musings

Remnants of the Empire

I know I said I would give up complaining about Former-Principal Palpatine... and for the most part, I have. I can't help, however, but continue to be annoyed by the aftertaste of her rule. Chief among the residual elements is the fact that more and more kids are being moved into my choir class, simply because there is nowhere else for them to go. For the second time in my stay at New Republic, the choir class has exceeded 50 kids - a number that wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that a third of them didn't really want to be there.

The inflexibility of the schedule was magnified by the removal of many of the school's electives, leaving only a few to carry the burden of the excess enrollment. Let's not forget that it was Palpatine's grand scheme to put a lot of the lower-academic performers into band - thus giving me the numbers to start a marching program. I won't go any further than that - you know how that light's my fuse.

What saddens me is the fact that I saw this coming years ago. I saw the school slowly transformed into Palpatine's instrument of progress. Now bereft of her driving ambition, the limbs still flail like the twitching corpse of Medusa, still fresh from Perseus' blow. Principal Leto is doing a pretty good job of not getting in people's way, but I'm starting to wonder if he will try to reshape the school to be something other than Palpatine's obsolete tool. I certainly hope so.

But can Eden be restored? Can we just reverse the machinations of a tyrant - rebuilding a more varied schedule of classes that would serve more student wants and needs? I don't know. It would involve the abandonment of newly formed sections of AP and Honors courses, and I don't know if this town would approve of that. Plus, people don't like schools being filled with 'frivolous' electives when the economy turns bad. It's just one of those things.

Still Dancing With The Devil

So last night I took a pep band to a home basketball game for the first time ever. I was asked by both the Athletics Director and Assistant Principal Bob. The game was kind of as big deal. After football season, I don't like to do pep anything. But they said "pretty please" and given that I'd promised to be a little more cooperative now that Palpatine is gone, I decided to help them out

It wasn't too hard - you can get away with a small group at basketball games. The only down side is that the CIF rules are a lot more strict for indoor sports, which means that we don't get as many chances to play. What I'm more worried about is the possible precedent that any sport can ask for our participation, and that last-minute pressure to show up at this game or that game will be a common practice. Eh... folks, I have a newborn at home now, I can't be doing that.

Still, I think I might just be being paranoid. The Athletics Director did say "Hey, if it's too much trouble, don't worry about it." But I decided to do it anyway just to earn brownie points, and to earn the right to maybe say "no" in the future without allowing the impression that I never say "yes."