NEXT APPEARANCE:
Saturday, March 27th, Virginia Festival of the Book, 2:00
I'll be sitting on a panel entitled Publish and Flourish: Networking through Readerville.com, along with my online chums Gretchen Moran Laskas (The Midwife's Tale), M.J. Rose (Sheet Music), and Roxana Robinson (Sweetwater). Readervillean, writer, and radio commentator Janis Jaquith (Birdseed Cookies) will moderate. Visit www.vabook.org for more information.

March comes in like a lion, all right. A big one, hopped up on antelope pineal extract and hormones, bounding around the savannah with claws unsheathed, chasing its tail and spewing pheromones into the thawing wind.

Around here, it's making its usual mess. We've got exams, first off. I'm proctoring one right now, for a student who won't be here for tomorrow's English exam. I've already given (and graded!) my speech exams, so at least I'm slightly ahead of where I usually am at this time, but there's no question that having the last exam before spring break succeth heade and bloweth meade, lhude sing goddam. By the time they get to Friday, the kids have all taken four to six other tests, and their brains are fried. Worse, they have to leave by 10:15, so there's a real sense of panic during that last morning, and it doesn't even have much to do with the vagaries of American drama. It's more like "Did I pack my swimsuit? Oh, man, do I have my plane tickets? Should I go by the ATM before the bus leaves for home?" I'll be lucky if they remember to write their exam essays in English and not Sanskrit or Fortran.

Once I give the exams, I've got to grade them, and calculate the grades for all my English students. I have fewer than I did last trimester, so it could be worse, but I've got to get about a dozen papers graded before I even get to the exams. AND enter all the data to calculate the grades. AND write comments about each student. And I have to do it all by noon on Tuesday.

This wouldn't be so hard if it weren't for the fact that Saturday is the day of the Virginia Catholic Forensic League State Finals. Thanks to some very talented kids, a little dumb luck, and yes, perhaps some competent coaching from yrs. truly, we had eleven students qualify for States this year; ten of them will actually compete. It doesn't sound like a big number, but we've never had more than FIVE earn a trip to States in a single year. Ten is a great number, both in terms of percentages (we've only got 14 kids on the whole team) and odds of earning a trip to nationals: the top five in each event win a trip to May's CFL Grand Nationals in Boston, and WFS has three of the 20 Extemp speakers, four of the 20 Student Congressmen, and three of the 16 Lincoln-Douglas debaters. I'm very happy with the team's performance, make no mistake. It's just that trying to get them ready for competition during exam week is a bit mind-frazzling.

We'll finish the competition, the awards ceremony, and the drive home on Saturday evening, just in time to watch the UNC-Duke game, something else which is guaranteed to make my brain buzz. (The new Sports Illustrated, by the way, has a wonderful article on the UNC-Duke rivalry; it's authored by Will Blythe, a fellow Chapel Hill native who went to both CHHS and UNC, and who's best known as Esquire's former fiction editor--check it out.) Once that's done, I may have a chance to grade exams and write comments, but I have to be done fairly quickly, because on Tuesday night, I'm catching a train to South Carolina. From there, my father and I will be driving to Florida to visit the Everglades, something I've wanted to do since I was four. I hope to return to Virginia sometime after St. Patrick's Day, but I'm not really sure when, because I haven't really had time to plan the trip yet.

Oh, and I turned 41 in there somewhere.

I'm really, really ready to be on spring break, make no mistake. I just hope I'm not broken by the time I get to it.
12:04 PM

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