School notes, mid-October edition

I woke up early this morning. I try to be up early when I can--I like to go out for a morning walk--but this morning when I checked the forecast, I elected to go curl up in front of the space heater instead.
This last week of school, in terms of the courses I'm taking, has been the sort of experience that makes you understand how one can get addicted to stimulants. (Don't worry; this is not a confession. I never resorted to anything harder than Mountain Dew.) I am not someone who has developed, how shall we call them, "good" study habits. You know the ones--like doing a little bit of work every day instead of waiting for the last moment. And last week a couple of my classes came to the end of their eight-week span, so I had something like six assignments to complete and turn in. (And that may be lower than the actual number, because I got tired just trying to remember them all and stopped at six.)
Now, part of the reason my work had piled up was that during this term I took trips out of town two weekends in a row. The first was to a family reunion for my father's side of the family. No way was I going to miss a gathering of 125 happy Italians and hangers-on. The next was the first-ever academic conference on U2, which just so happened to take place on the same weekend just down the road from a U2 concert, can you imagine that? Next to Italian relatives, U2 fans are my favorite group of people to be around, so no way was I missing this, either. But all of this gallivanting did lead to my assignments stacking up such that they were taking turns joyfully jumping off the high dive, so to speak. The good news is that everything due last week has been turned in and my next round of classes do not begin until, oh, Tuesday.
As for my adventures in observation at the grade school--it's been the educational home of the walking wounded. You may have heard that there's some nasty sickness floating around. Grade schools being disease factories to begin with, it may not surprise you to learn that on days last week up to eight kids (in a class of twenty-one) were absent. (One of my fellow intern teachers had ten kids out of a class of twenty one day.) Interestingly, a different set of kids was gone each day; this did make it easier to help the previously-absent set catch up with their work, but it also meant there was little point moving on with lessons to cover new material.
And now I must dash to get to school to begin the new week, but I will leave you with this anecdote--the seven-year-olds had an assignment in handwriting to write a sentence about the continent they live on. One little fella decided he was going to be clever and wrote, "I like North America so much, I don't know where to begin."