Apologies to my readers for sparse posting over the last week or two. Grades for the first semester are due at 9:00 AM tomorrow, so I've been bogged down marking midterms and calculating averages. Quite a few of my 7th-graders are going to be unpleasantly surprised.

Posting should pick up a bit starting tomorrow. I have plenty to say, though nothing on the space shuttle that hasn't already been said more eloquently by others.

In the mean time, here's a tiny note on the sociology of bureaucracy:

Yesterday was the first day since mid-December that my middle school's copy room has had any white 8.5 x 11 copy paper. By mid-January we had used up all the 8.5 x 14 paper (giving the paper cutter a good workout along the way) and have since gone through the 8.5 x 11 pink, lavender, and 'goldenrod'. I assumed that this was just a symptom of gross bureaucratic sclerosis, but my mentor thinks it was a devious plot by the principal to force us to use up the boxes of pink, lavender, and goldenrod that had been lying around taking up storeroom space for years. I suspect she's right.

Now back to the metaphorical salt mines for an all-night shift . . . .