Back-to-School quotes

Tertia's first day of public school 8th grade was yesterday.  I am grateful my happiest child is the one I'm sending off to the educational situation where I have the least involvement and familiarity with it; I still worry about her, but she will be all right.  It's her gift.  She also has a very cheerful, efficient and punctual bus driver, same as last year.  Any other mom could probably confirm how beneficial that is!

As for me, I've spent the last two days in mandatory inservice.  Secundus and Quarta will join me Monday for the first day of school, at which we are expected to hit the ground running.  I was just up at the campus this morning, and I do have a desk now.  The paint is drying in the room where it will be.  I have three classrooms to set up as much Latin information as I am able to fit onto 1-2 bulletin boards and a bit of shelf space.  I have an entire year's worth of lesson plans canned from last year; I will need to manually change the dates and insert any different information -- that massive bit of text editing will take anywhere from an hour to 3 days, depending on variables I haven't calculated yet.  My biggest bit of copying is done (I added a ream of paper twice).  I would kind of like to know the names of the kids I am teaching before I walk into class Monday, but it will probably be okay.  I'm not quite so sure about the carpool.  Back to school will work because... there is no other option.  The moms and the teachers of the world need to make it work.

So without further ado, I will close with a series of quotes (from the cryptograms.org website I've been playing obsessively lately) that for some reason made me think of the back to school cycle.

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"The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin."
— Heinrich Heine

"Grade school is the snooze button on the clock-radio of life."

— John Rogers

"Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them."

— Paul Hawken

"The sooner you make your first five thousand mistakes the sooner you will be able to correct them."

— Kimon Nicolaides

"I never guess. It is a shocking habit -- destructive to the logical faculty. "

— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

"Acquire new knowledge whilst thinking over the old, and you may become a teacher of others. "

— Confucius

The way you overcome shyness is to become so wrapped up in something that you forget to be afraid."

— Lady Bird Johnson

"A human being must have occupation if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world."

— Dorothy L. Sayers

"Life is mostly froth and bubble. Two things stand like stone - Kindness in another's trouble, Courage in your own."

— Adam L. Gordon

"When we are out of sympathy with the young, then I think our work in this world is over. "

— George Macdonald