Busted tires, taxes, and surprising lessons

I KNEW my car sounded funny driving into work this morning. One of my co-workers saw my car in the parking lot and informed me that I had a flat tire. He then, g-d bless him, called the Auto guy, who sent a kid up to find the car and change the tire for me. Co-Worker the first kept on it all day to make sure I got my car back. Really, all he had to do was tell me the tire was flat; I would've taken it from there with Auto guy.

What I didn't like was him telling me how to thank the kids for fixing the tire so quickly; of COURSE I was going to buy them donuts when I went into work on Thursday (I have a conference tomorrow); do I look like an idiot? (Incidentally, can you double-semi-colon in the same sentence?)

Also, I'm very confused by taxes. You're supposed to claim one thing, so they take lots of money from you, but then at the end of the year, you claim something else and they give you money back. Okay, fine...sort of. Government math makes my head hurt.

Booted two kids from my Creative Writing class today. The class was not stellar afterwards, but I could definitely work more with individual students instead of worrying about what was going to fly across my room or be drawn on my desks. I feel bad for my department head (a little), but he said he'd take the brats. So he can have them.

I'm working with my juniors (honors) on the College Search because everyone else in my building seems to think this is a senior year endeavor. Ah, no. Anyway, so I introduced the unit to them today and they were actually REALLY excited for the most part; glad that someone was taking an interest in their desire. We went down to the library, played with the Princeton Review website and the kids got a list of colleges. I had them write down the essay topics for the schools as well. They didn't even balk at the idea of writing these essays.

Funny bit--one of the kids was complaining how he kept getting really low compatibilities with the colleges on his list (say, under 60%). So I registered for the site and pretended I was a high school senior. Albertus didn't even show up on the list of possible schools for me. The kids got a kick out of that, and then stopped freaking about the percentages. A lot of my kids had Harvard or Yale on their Reach lists, which was strange. Not that these kids aren't smart, but... ...

So that's it. I leave you with one picture from my trip to Boston.