This is part of the reason I hope I hear I have the job

OK, you and I are officially not happy. Wednesday's quiz, taken during the half day, demonstrated that you do not, after 8 months in a high school math course, know how to do arithmetic, not with fractions, not with square roots, not at all when I put a variable into any of those arithmetic operations.

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Ok, I started this page off announcing that you and I were not happy. I know why I'm not happy...I don't like realizing that I have only one month left to make sure you can do arithmetic, before a summer comes and I lose contact with you. I hope that the reason you are not happy is only 20% because of what it is doing to your grade, and what the next 3 weeks will end up doing to your grade if you don't get this fixed, and 80% because you realize that being able to do arithmetic is a fundamental skill to someone who is planning to take math the rest of your high school career, and that plain old arithmetic is an essential part of your knowledge base as you later decide to join the adult world. That's the real reason to be unhappy...you're entering a world that you will be victimized by, because of a lack of understanding of how numbers work. Monetary decisions involving anything other than single digit positive numbers will be made by you with less knowledge than the people competing for your money will have...you will not win those encounters. Don't let something trivial like whether or not it's sunny out, or whether or not the boy or girl that you're smitten with is equally smitten with you. Smitten-ness for a 15 year old is invariably temporary...being ignorant is far more likely to be lifelong and doesn't change without intense effort. Focus.

I like you all; you're fun people, but I'm trying much harder than you are lately, and it's showing.

So well said, so well reasoned, and so focused on what's best for students. I haven't heard yet, but Don is part of the reason I really want to be back in Roseburg next year. Oh yeah, it doesn't hurt that he's a huge Blazer fan and we can have well reasoned discussions about the most promising team in the league.

*I took that straight from his website.