We’re three days in to the new year, and all three days I’ve had a vague and nagging feeling that something was just plain un-right. I wasn’t able to place it until this evening.

I spent a good chunk of pre-planning trying to determine the best layout for my classroom given the increased class sizes. In all that time I spent trying to figure out how to arrange 35 desks in my room, and which other pieces of furniture to rearrange or remove in order to accommodate those desks, and where to move the items that once sat upon the pieces of furniture I had to remove, and which desks were too badly broken to re-use, and where to get replacement desks from, and whether I felt like cleaning the desktops before the angels put their heads down on them, and where to put the small desks, and where to put the big desks, and where to put the red desks, and where to put the blue desks, and how to implement feng shui and optimize the flow of ch’i through my classroom and whether I was spending way too much time on the whole matter when I should have been goofing off… I forgot one small detail.

I forgot to hang my flags– Bennington, Washington’s Standard, and Gadsden. Those flags have adorned my classroom walls since time immemorial. ‘Twill be rectified tomorrow.