Square One

A note to my growing number of readers (!): I'm pretty busy right now with school and all of that added stress, so my posts will be fairly infrequent. I'd say, expect probably around one a week, maybe even less. One week down, 35 to go for this school year. So far, the workload has been pretty typical, no big exams or papers just yet. I've finally been able to reach some conclusions about my teachers. Here goes...
Chemistry: Mr. M is reasonably nice, but his voice drones on in this mundane monotone. I'm surprised I haven't fallen asleep yet. He is lenient about lab reports though, unlike the other Chem teachers.
Gym: My gym teacher, mentioned in a previous post, has not been present this week, but according to the substitute, he will be back next week. I had him last year, so I know everything he's about, namely yelling.
French: Madame is OK, but very demanding. We've already had to write an essay, and all our homework is graded for accuracy. Plus, we get homework pretty much every night, in the form of a writing assignment or reading passage with follow-up questions.
Pre-Calc: "Pestilence", who is annoyingly perky, has a sign in her room saying, "Math is easy, fun, and we love it!" However, Pre-Calc is anything but that statement. It's challenging, and we've already had a test!
Wind Ensemble: B is the same old guy he's always been, funny when he's in a good mood, grouchy when he's in a bad mood. :) The music in WE is very hard, and we have our first playing test/placement audition next week. :(
English: "Disease" is reasonable personality-wise, but her class is hard and kinda scary. We cover a lot of material all at the same time, from reading a piece of literature, to working on a paper, to writing a play/film/book/TV review, to in-class writing, to reading a novel, to writing a response to something we've read. English is usually one of my strongest subjects, but this is still a bit overwhelming.
Lunch: There's an influx of freshmen in my lunch period. Luckily, I have a few friends to sit with in my grade. I know them fairly well from having classes with them.
Newspaper: It's going rather slow at the moment. We've gone over some basics of journalism, which unfortunately I already knew. Our actual teacher is on maternity leave until November. The substitute is nice and tries to make things remotely exciting, so hopefully he'll be successful soon. Maybe he'll come up with some productive things for us to do.
World Affairs: Social Studies is another strong subject of mine, and so far I'm really liking this course. Hildy, nicknamed War (actually, Hildy is one of his nicknames as well), is a very interesting individual and makes class discussions very intriguing. He gets off topic a lot, so we haven't learned much yet. However, we've discussed a lot of current events (foreign policy, the election), which is a lot of fun for me, and a lot of random things he spontaneously brings up. All the academic courses are honors, as usual, so I'm expecting more work in the coming weeks. Aside from school, I've got quite a few extracurriculars, including forensics and a lot of volunteering.

Ending on another random note: for the past week, I've noticed that Sarah Palin (right) strikingly resembles one of my favorite comedy writers/actors Tina Fey (left). This got me thinking: Tina Fey could totally return to SNL and make a little cameo appearance as Sarah Palin on a few episodes leading up to the election! SNL is putting a lot focus on the election for the first two months of the new season, even airing three live, half-hour "Weekend Update" episodes on Thursdays in October, "Thursday Night Live". So, they're really going to need a great person to play Palin. Tina's obviously busy with "30 Rock", but SNL probably wouldn't cut into her time too much if she just did a brief cameo. Tina, the master comedienne, would be fantastic as Palin! :)