Today were Middle School Science Teacher Meetings at the district office, which meant that there were wall-to-wall substitutes in one quadrant of the school. It was fun. My neighbor was Mr. Peterson, whom people get me confused with all the time (I get called Mr. Peterson maybe 50% of the time). He had the “bad” kids who weren’t on an all-day field trip. Good news for him: he only had 2-7 kids per class. I had mostly 8^th graders. The teacher wanted them to do silent reading, which really doesn’t work with middle school kids. I offered to give each class 10 free minutes if they could do the work and stay absolutely quiet for 40 minutes. Four out of five classes did. The fifth class had two kids who were very talkative. I wrote them up for not following directions, but still gave the rest of the class their 10 minutes because they were good.

This evening’s band practice was excellent because we had a very good mix of musicians. We were very loud, but precise and practiced.