Oh! I have been meaning to mention that Natasha is moving on at the end of this year. We have seen less of each other since the move to the new high school building–we’re two floors apart and use different faculty workrooms–but I’ll miss knowing her at work. We’ll probably keep in sporadic touch through Facebook. Her daughter left SA after eighth grade, and Natasha has been thinking of moving on for a while. She had been moved out of teaching bio into chem, and had a pretty demanding teaching load overall, and I think didn’t feel very well treated in general. The new gig is at a very small, newer school, where she’ll basically create their high school science curriculum and get to have new challenges that she’s actually excited about, instead of ones that are thrust upon her.
And of course we’re losing Lucinda. I got her a gift card from the department to the famous independent bookstore in her new city, and we circulated a card to give her at our regular end-of-semester department lunch together on Monday. I’ve moved this from the hip restaurant with the bad parking (the last straw was when two people, one of them our new colleague, missed the lunch because of the parking situation) to a less glamorous, but still pretty nice, deli with a huge menu and a liquor license. We’ll see how people like the new venue. There are other places we can try next time if it’s not quite right.
Literature Should Mean Something in Your Life 