Maybe I should have left them how they were, but I don’t remember if I’ve submitted the forms before or not.

Today’s “work” day project as part of my house arrest was to update and reformat the rules form I pass out to my high school second year students. This involved resizing and centering and tweaking a couple fonts. If I’d left it at that, things would have been fine.

However, tweaking things like that trigger what I call “the doodle reflex”.  This is the phenomenon where you’re scribbling a couple silly pictures on a piece of paper during a meeting and then you start adding a line here and thickening a line there and experimenting with shading all over the place and pretty soon the doodle is the center of your attention and you’ve got to make it perfect and before you know it you’ve got a sloppy masterpiece that needs just a little more work and then you realize everyone is looking at you as if you’re a moron because your boss has been trying to get your attention for at least ten minutes. (Oh, like that hasn’t happened to you.)

With the rules changes, one change led to another and then I decided to make a worksheet to help reinforce the rules in the students’ minds and I suddenly I was working on two doodles and although both were sloppy, neither was perfect.

All this took a lot longer than I thought it would and in the end I have something I’ll probably change again.

Eventually, I’m supposed to submit it, but since it’s class rules, I’ll probably say it’s not right for me to do so. I’ll make that a new rule. With nice formatting.