The Last Wednesday of The Semester...

And all is pretty well. Not so much with my junior high kids ( I'll call them The Knuckleheads for short), because they were pretty well at the level of near-pathological behavior by the time that I returned for math in the afternoon. I have no idea what got into them. They are a sketchy bunch at times, but this week had degenerated into some kind of madness that I cannot comprehend.

There is no alternative that I can see to trying to figure them out. None. We will be stuck with each other for the entire semester starting January 20. I do not care for the looks of that last sentence, all of a sudden. I wonder if it is possible to get some sort of doctor's excuse from all this...

Speaking of doctors, I got the bill from the hospital from my little visit back in September. I get to eat the lion's share of it. I thank heavens for the fact that I am not oppressed by any socialistic system of medical care in which faceless bureaucrats far away determine what gets paid for or not. Yippee. And please feel free to keep your comments to yourselves. I am not interested in what you think. We pay twice what the rest of the world pays and with mixed results. That is nonsense, but at least the insurance companies will come out of this OK. I was worried for a while.

The knuckleheads did do allright this morning. I showed them a movie called "In the Shadow Of The Moon," which documents the Apollo missions to the moon. The cynical, media-wise, know it all adolescents were actually impressed. They asked questions. They listened with an apparent sense of wonder to my explanations. One of them asked me what it was like to watch the landings on television. I told him, "The coolest thing that I ever saw." It was fun to see that they could still, despite all of the dissapointments that make up their lives, retain a sense of wonder. It choked me up, a little bit, for a minute. And then, of course, life went back to its normal course, as it always does, and always will. It was nice to step out of that for a minute or two, just the same.