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I said a little about it on Sandra’s Blog (A Shot in the Dark) but it’s our population that makes the difference.

I hired on there 14 years ago, when we were artifically 30/30/30. 30 white, 30 black, 30 hispanic and 10% other. Artificially as it was done by court order. We had a lot of interesting programs to get us that way. One was a scholarship program, that if you would go to a school in our district where you were the minority, you would get your college tutition paid if you want to a state supported college.

What makes it so cool, in my opinion, is that with that history of diversity, and with the diversity we have, we just don’t have the problems with cliques and social exclusion that a lot of schools have.

I did my student teaching at a much bigger school, that had a huge majority in one race. As a result, lots of students felt excluded. Even worse, they broke up by social/economic groups too, which we don’t see much of either. I really hated that experience, because you felt like you were always the referee.

So do have some cliquiness, but it mostly has to do with what kind of student you are. The AP kids tend to hang together, mostly because they have classes together.

One of the things that I think helps the most, is that we have a common feeder school, so all of our students attended the same middle school also.

We haven’t had the problems with the New Orleans kids that some of our other schools have, more proof to me, that we’re more accepting than most.

Anyway, as a teacher, it’s fun, since the kiddos on the whole seem to accept anything that comes their way.

Sandra asked about my pizza experiment.

Here’s what I did detailed:

I took 20 units of Symlin first.

Then I ate pizza, counting sliced.

I then bolused for half of the pizza I ate, and did a combo bolus. 50% at the time of bolusing, and 50% over 4 hours.

I’m not sure if Symlin was the key or not, to tell the truth.

I also made a correction at the end of the movie, per my pump. Though I only bolused for half of the correction.

I weighed today, and of course, checked my blood sugar, and even after the few excursions in the last week or so, and even with the higher insulin usages, between the agility trials, the workshop, and the holiday season, my weight is still good, and the blood sugar is good.

The next few weeks will be “different”. We’ve got one full day of class left, then 4 days of exams, then a little over 2 weeks for break.

I’m going to a weekend basal rate for the duration.

I’m working on a few projects to make things better. I’ve been having trouble doing longer walks on my treadmill. A lot of the problem is boredom — when I do exercise, there isn’t a lot of good TV on. I’ve decided to at least switch to a digital cable box so I can watch movies, but I’m also thinking about putting DVR box in that room. It’s a bit more expensive each month on the cable bill, but if it will keep me on the treadmill longer, it will be worth it, and I can always change my mind.

I’m also thinking of expanding my weight routine. I’ve about convinced my husband that a weight stack would be worth it for me, and I might get something small for Christmas. I have been thinking about a fold up unit, as I am starting to run out of room the study.

Some good news, my GERD isn’t bothering me as much. Even my pizza night, I didn’t have problems. I think what has helped more than anything is to stop eating salad in the evening. I like to get a really salad, with lots of lettuce and while it fills me up, I think it’s just too hard to digest in the evening, so I am limiting those to the afternoon.

I may have figured pizza out. Last night, husband and I had pizza and watched a movie together — it was a very nice evening.

We watched Knights of South Bronx, a movie about chess in schools.

I did Symlin, and did a combo bolus, then a correction at the end of the movie and ended up with a blood sugar of 101 this morning. Don’t think I could have done better! I’ll confess, I did four pieces, did a combo bolus for 60 carbs over 4 hours. I think — I’ll double check that the next time I download my pump. And I checked, and yes, it was for 4 hours.

And hey, I don’t have to worry about being in starvation mode for a few weeks.

Excellent movie. First you have to understand that Rich and I met at the Dallas Chess club and did all our dating playing chess. To make the marriage work though, I had to quit playing. We were just a little too competitive. It works much better with us doing seperate competitive events.

Kinights of the South Bronx is a feel good movie. It doesn’t show any of the bad aspects of chess — or even teaching for that matter. I think it is a really good movie for both chess players and teachers but just realize that it only shows the good side. Of course, seeing only the good side of teaching is a good thing at the end of a semester.

If you want to see a more balanced view of chess, Searching for Bobby Fischer is a better movie in my opinion, but still doesn’t show the bad aspects of youth chess as bad as it could be. I suppose that some of our experiences with parents and chess might have influenced us not to have children. Yeah, they can be pretty abusive.

We are having a bout with an ice storm — temps below 30, heck below 25 most of the time — and we had rain yesterday, so most of the school districts, including mine, shut down.

I always get irritated at the news reports — they always find some “damn yankee”, who criticizes the area for shutting down. I’ve been down here 20 years, and I have been very thankful every time we’ve shut down. My district is very conservative about shutting down — quite a few districts shut down yesterday but we didn’t. I was a bit concerned, but we got through the day, and apparently got every student home safely.

We have had some other times when I thought we should have shut down, but we didn’t. There are some major concerns when you are a district as big as we are: quite a few of our students will not be supervised and worse yet, a bunch of them did not get lunch today. The supervision doesn’t matter with my kids, since I do high school, but it is a problem for the younger kids.

I hate the timing, but it will work out for me. We start finals on Tuesday. I was a bit worried that I would not be able to fill all three days with review, but two days will be just fine.

When I went into school yesterday I did two out of the three things that would make it easier for me stay if we couldn’t have gotten home. One was to leave my contacts at home and wear glasses. The other was to make sure I had enough insulin on me, and to carry an extra meal — a tuna salad package.

The glasses thing was funny. It really bothered my ELI students more than anything. One group thought it might I was tired. The others just wanted to know. However, it did give me problems, as I have good far vision with my glasses but absolutely no near vision, and the Algebra students needed to do some graphing. I ended up leaving them to do the graphing on their own.

When I review, I like to make sure that I work each review problem for the students and that they have recorded how to do it. I’m sure that my students won’t study, but you never know. I work very hard to make sure I do my part.

I have to relate something funny — at least to me. They moved about 25 students out of my classes, as they were over crowded, and gave them to another teacher — the AP Calculus teacher who is VERY good at what she does.

She came to me yesterday upset because she says the students don’t like her, and like me better and tell her that all the time. I already knew this, because they tell me that when they see me. However, I don’t think it’s personal on either side. These were students who were all working for me, and were my best students. I think if they had had her first, and had come to me, they would still feel the same way. I also am not sure that there is anything that she can do differently to change things.