I'm rather upset at the moment. There are several reasons, and if you hate listening to someone throw a bitch-fest, by all means tune out now. Number One: Ken's birthday passed, and nobody said anything about it. Number Two: This has been absolutely the loneliest day of my life. I think I had expectations too high for what I'd finally do with a WHOLE day off from both jobs. Regardless of how nice it is to not work 14-16 hours in a day, it doesn't mean squat if you don't do jack. I'd rather work 16 hours than sit at home alone all day. I used the phone a couple of times and caught up with my family (finally). I'm starting to really be bothered by the fact that nobody calls to see what or how I'm doing. The only time I get messages or calls are when people need something. I understand that other people are busy too, but I always found time to call and at least say, "What's up?" No point in rambling about it anymore. I guess the main message was conveyed.

This officially concluded the first full week of teaching. One thing that is very uncomforting is that I average approximately $5.62 per hour for teaching. If I had a teaching degree... in a few weeks, I'd be making ~$15-$20 per hour. I'm definitely getting shafted (if you had to teach my keyboarding classes, this fact would be clearly illustrated). I am considering another alternative... What I'd like to do is ask them to find someone else to teach Keyboarding and just pay me the half day salary for 1 hour and 45 minutes of my time. That would leave me extra time in my day to plan for the Visual Basic classes, and let some other chump deal with the bullshit. I would probably teach the VB classes for free, because those students want to learn. Oh well, I guess we'll see how it all boils out in the end.

Good and Bad News today... First the bad news... I was an idiot and thought that I had the night off from Wal-Mart. They left a message on my machine, so I called them back, and ultimately ended up finishing the last 3 hours of my 6 hour shift. Now the good news, I accomplished a very cool thing for my Visual Basic students. I wrote a letter to Bill G. at Microsoft requesting some freebie trial editions of the Visual Basic 6.0 software. The letter was forwarded to a marketing director who was very generous indeed. She is giving the school one full version of the Visual Basic 6.0 software, and along with it... legal permission to make CD-R copies for the students and 60 licenses for each one of them. They were thrilled, and I felt good. I really like this job, unfortunately, it's only temporary...

Today was 10 times smoother than my first day. I was right, I had to send a kid from 7th period out into the hall today. It set a very good example for the rest of the classroom. It was amazing how much quieter and focused they became after seeing the "Wrath of the Substitute". There's a couple cool guys in the 1st period Visual Basic class. They took the class last year and do a good job of aiding me with the other students. They are known as "peer tutors", which is kind of like "teacher's aids" except they have a greater responsibility (to help students). One of them asked me to help him with a random number routine for a Dungeons & Dragons character generator! Of course, I was happy to oblige and gave him the good code today. I'm off from Wal-Mart the next 3 nights (starting tomorrow), so I'd like to get together with anybody who'd like to watch some movies or anime (cheap). I'll have some school planning to do, but if I can't learn to enjoy what little time I have, I'm going to be in for some serious hurting soon. Bye bye for now!

Damn, I can already tell that I'm going to have very little time to write. I promise there will be big updates sometime between Tues-Thurs. Tomorrow begins Day 2 of Operation: Teach Cool Kids Visual Basic and Obnoxious Freshman Keyboarding. I can already foresee that someone from 7th period is going to be sent out into the hall. I've been thinking of ideas for neat programming assignments, and tomorrow is gonna be a pop-quiz! Well, more about teaching later. I gotta sleep now, hopefully the kids still think I'm a cool guy after tomorrow (quizzes have a terrible way of changing people's minds).