matching tracksuits

Today in School

Wednesday 02 September 2026

A-Day students began with a quick agenda check to make sure all students were caught up with their agendas. I've allowed students to work on their agendas without much input from me, but we will now begin regular agenda checks.

A perfect example of a well-completed agenda

After completing the check, we finished our first SMART goal beginning with a look at three example goals. As with yesterday's work, students worked to identify the various SMART parts of the goals.

I will raise my math grade from a C to a B by the end of the semester by completing all homework, asking two questions in class each week, and studying for 30 minutes after school on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
I will increase my reading level by one grade level by the end of the school year by reading 20 minutes every night and completing one book report each month.
I will improve my science test scores from an average of 70% to at least 85% within the next two months by reviewing notes for 15 minutes each night and meeting with my teacher once a week for extra help.

We finished the day by pulling together all the elements of our SMART goal planning guide into a cohesive, comprehensive goal for the first quarter.

Health Clinic False Future

Sunday 30 August 2026

I might have suggested at one point that the derelict health clinic in Jabłonka might be a depressing harbinger of things to come in Poland. The left two-thirds of the building is in its original state: old windows from the sixties (the ubiquitous three-pane windows of the Soviet bloc, windows I've seen in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Lithuania as well as period videos of the Soviet Union and East Germany), the strange nearly-mansard roof (also common in the Warsaw Pact), pealing paint and chipped plaster. It all speaks to the neglect that was so common in the buildings just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The right third of the building has undergone some renovation: an addition was initiated and roughed in, with the roof clearly made of a more modern material. Yet it, too, is neglected, standing in the raw state (as Poles would say in direct translation). A rebirth that was in fact a still-birth.

If you'd asked me what I saw as a worst-case scenario for Poland twenty-five years ago, I would have suggested something like this. I would have expected start-stop-start-stop growth and development that would manifest itself in buildings like this throughout Poland.

Instead, the last twenty-five years, it has transformed from a poor country emerging hesitantly from the Soviet shadow to a country with one of the top-twenty largest economies in the world. The GDP per capita increased from roughly $4,500 in 2000 to over $25,000 by 2024 (current U.S. dollars), and it has gone from half the EU average to 80% of the EU average during that same time. Buildings such as this exception not the standard.

Goralski Newlyweds

Sunday 30 August 2026

First Marching Band Performance

Friday 28 August 2026

The Sign

Wednesday 26 August 2026

The sign that got me fussed at a little last year when people from the district came in for observations and noticed it. They didn't say anything to me; they spoke to my principal, who then spoke to me. They gave me $3,000 worth of books for the kids to have an in-class library -- a curated list, mind you -- and then expected me to make a spreadsheet listing them in my free time.

Had the district people had the nerve to speak to me about it directly, I would have suggested that they could come and help make these lists for all the teachers. It would certainly be a better use of their time for which they were getting paid a six-figure salary.

Visit

Tuesday 25 August 2026

During the last days of my stay in Lipnica in 1999, there was a very significant religious occurrence in the village: priests who were taking the famed Black Madonna of Częstochowa brought the painting to the village for veneration. I watched from a distance as the painting arrived and local dignitaries began parading it down the main street of the village.

As someone who'd grown up in the decidedly-Protestant South in an emphatically anti-Catholic sect, I found all such displays of devotion strange. "It's just a painting," I would have argued even knowing its cultural and historical significance to Poles. "It's not magic or anything." But Catholic veneration of relics and such does include a certain sense of what I can only call magic. Relics heal; relics protect; relics bless. Catholics would explain that they're simply physical conduits of God's mercy, healing, and love, but that's really all magical objects are: physical objects that are supposedly conduits of supernatural power.

Even during my brief foray into Catholicism left me skeptical about relics and such. Magical thinking just seems so hokey in the twenty-first century.

But there is something undeniably magical in the nostalgia that washes over me when I watched a recently-published video from that day. I've watched it a couple of times, wondering if I'd see myself in it. I never did, but I saw countless former students and colleagues, some of whom have died in the intervening 27 years.

Morning Conestee Walk

Sunday 23 August 2026

Jagodzianki, Redux

Saturday 22 August 2026

Twenty Two

Saturday 15 August 2026

Early School Year Thoughts

Tuesday 11 August 2026

It was the end of the day, and it was relatively painful. Not really painful, but it was painful to think about what Thursday would be like. All the students will be there Thursday, all 800 of them, and the stress that dismissal caused today will only be amplified.

Since we are a charter school, we have no buses, so every child is a car rider. That means every child must be picked up by a car, which means that all those cars have to line up and then pick up the kid, one by one.

We have a system in place, but it’s not the best. It’s a new school and we are working out techniques as we go along. We try something, it doesn’t work, and then we go back and try something else.

Our dismissal technique yesterday was slower than today, so we are improving. But we still have only faced two grades at a time since we’re doing a staggered start: third and fourth grade came Monday; fifth and sixth grades came today; seventh and eighth grades will come tomorrow.

It’s only on Thursday that all grades will arrive and leave. The arriving is fine. The time between arrival and departure is fine. It’s the last step that needs the work.

Still, that means we have a lot of learning to do through tomorrow, when we only have 150 students.