First day back after Parents’ Weekend. It was a nice couple of days off. I got to use an electric chainsaw, and help get and ChM ready for winter. Got to go to breakfast yesterday with BG and HA, and turn in my dry cleaning. I’m going to be trying an experiment between now and Chrismas — washing my own shirts at home, and hanging them to dry after 20 minutes in the dryer. Currently I’m spending about $150 a month on dry cleaning and laundering, and on the one hand the shirts look nice — but that’s also a couple of weeks worth of groceries in summer, when I’m eating at home every day.
We went to walk a labyrinth last night, down in Moodus (Heartstone Labyrinths, LLC), and I got a lot out of the visit: mostly how not to build a labyrinth. I think the one the kids and I did out in the woods is much, much better. He did his with a chalk-line layer, like the school custodians use for laying down football and soccer fields; he also used surveyor’s flags to lay out his labyrinths. I think my biggest objection was that they were not circular or even symmetrical. I would like to be able to lay out a big Chartres-style labyrinth with seven or nine circuits here on campus, but that’s a major undertaking, unfortunately, in more ways than one. We’d need a couple of truckloads of stone, at least, and the top of Cow Hill is the only place I can think of to do it. And there, you can see the maintenance building, and the lights from Pomfret. Maybe the field between the planned soccer field and the baseball diamond — and maybe I can enlist JL’s dad in that project, too.
I don’t have many classes today. Both my ninth grade tutoring assignments are away (this isn’t to say I won’t get saddled with someone else’s young man or woman for those periods, but mine are away). My ninth grade history class is down to four kids from twelve. My ninth grade English class probably has three or four students, as well. It’s probably a good day to do writing exercises with both groups of kids, and try to get them up to speed on writing good paragraphs.
Seventh grade will be full; those kids don’t have good reasons to vanish for a week at a time. And I also may find today that I have another kid during E period, who could be any grade at all. We’ll see.
