I only made two mistakes today, which is pretty good, even though both either did or will force changes.

Today was my first day in front of live students (as opposed to the imaginary evil ones that always seem to make my life hell even though they only exist in my anticipation/pessimism). Before class I did some kindergarten level art work with scissors, paste, a roll card and a student list.

The process begins with choosing the color of roll cards for each grade. There used to be inflexible rules controlling this but now the only rule seems to be “get all the good colors before everyone else uses them up”. I chose pink for my first year junior high school students, lavender for my second years, green for my third years, and blue for my second year high school.

That is followed by cutting out the name lists and pasting them on the cards.

For my first mistake I started using lavender for third years. I didn’t realize that until I made my second mistake. (More on that in a minute.)

The first class went well. The third year boys were loud but not defiant (at least not yet) and my brief television appearance on the news this morning  made me a minor celebrity among the few students who had seen it. (More on that in a future post.) That got me more street cred than I would normally have on the first day.

After work, I took my cards home with intent to finish making the cards. I pasted the remaining third year name lists onto blue cards and then set about finishing the rest. That’s when it hit me that I’d changed colors again. The official colors of third year junior high are now lavender and blue. Second year high school is lavender and second year junior high is green. I am resisting the urge to change the one lavender card to blue, but that’s only because I’m at home with no extra blue cards.

I did manage to type all the name lists into my score spreadsheet and probably fixed all the minor errors. However, after all the mistakes I made today, I’m sure I missed something major.