It seems like it might be time for a quick update that is not controversial by any stretch of the imagination.

On Friday, June 24th, Katie and I took a trip to Niagara Falls and on Saturday, June 25th, I asked her to marry me. This is a fairly exciting development in my life, and it has really been the culmination of a string of obscenely good luck that I have been having lately. Let me fill you in on the details. First, I get a job at UW for the summer without even really seeking it out. It just fell right in my lap. After that, two job postings at a private school appear. We both apply and both get interviews. I interview first, and I get offered a job the very next day. This is quite fortunate, because immediately following the job interview, I drove to Mississauga and purchased an engagement ring for Katie.

Now, the fact that they already offered a job to me makes Katie extremely nervous and erodes her confidence slightly. That being said, she still manages to go in to the school (on the same day that I am being given a tour of the facilities) and interviews like mad. Two weeks after my interview (on the very same day I am able to pick up the engagement ring), Katie receives a call offering her the other job. It worked out perfectly. The school is also a fabulous school. The facilities are so amazing that they literally melt my eyeballs right out of their sockets (but it is okay, they grew back) and the staff seem supernaturally intelligent (and quite humorous too, which I like).

The two of us have been to a department meeting together at the school already, and been given our teaching assignments. I am teaching Gr. 9 academic (2 sections), Gr. 11 university (1 section), Gr. 11 university/college (1 section), and Advanced Functions/Calculus and Vectors (2 sections). The school is non-semestered, but since Calculus and Vectors requires Advanced Functions as a pre-requisite, these two courses are treated as one super course that is taught throughout the whole year, with content from Advanced Functions coming first and Calculus and Vectors coming second. This is amazing for me because Geometry and Discrete Mathematics - a course long since obliterated by the “new curriculum” brought in by Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne - is the course that made me want to teach mathematics. Back in the good old days of my youth, it had a nice sprinkling of vectors and planes, mathematical proofs, and counting methods. Now, math students do not see proofs until they come to university, which is only doing them a disservice. But then, what do I know?

Anyway, Katie and I have found a place to live in Vaughan for the year. I’m going to buy us a nice big HDTV for our living room. Plus the engagement. So, yeah. Things are good.

That is my update for now. I’ve typed all of this while at work, because my current job has nothing for me to do. I’ve been tasked with typesetting the upcoming Gr. 9, 10, and 11 math contests, but it would seem that they underestimated my proficiency with LaTeX and with Canvas because I finished that lengthy assignment in less than 2 full days. I clearly need to decrease my work ethic…and then I will have to ramp it up again once I am teaching (since I have 5 “preps*” which exceeds a full teaching load I believe).

• Preps refers to the number of unique classes that a teacher has to prepare for in their teaching career. Typically you have two “preps” for every one “spare**” that you have in your schedule so that you can - ideally - plan your lessons during your spares without having to take lesson planning home. They save that time for marking stuff, and boy do I use it (as I like to return marked material the very next day if possible). At the school I am teaching at, we are supposed to have 6 in-class periods and 2 spares, and of the in-class periods we should only have 4 preps.

** Spares refers to the periods in a school day where a teacher is not required to teach. In most schools, a teacher will still be “on call”, meaning that they will be required to cover another class to avoid calling in an occasional teacher (the PC term for substitute or supply teacher). In a nonsensical decision, sometimes “spares” are also referred to as “preps” by teachers, meaning that the sentence “I am going to prep my prep during my prep” is - apparently - a valid sentence in teacher lingo.

Anyway, that will suffice for now. I would very much like to get back into posting regular updates…but I feel like I am very negligent with my promises in that realm, so I will not commit to anything just yet.

• J