First Day on the J-O-B

Yep, today was day one on the job...new employee orientation. It went pretty well. I have to admit, it was a bit odd....it started off with dancing. Well, not necessarily me dancing (I'll get to that in a minute), but my boss was. To The Romantics - What I Like About You. It's corny (he admitted it) but we have certain "rituals" within the program that signal to the students when it's time to do certain things. So he started with that and then we spent the first 15 minutes deciding if we were going to use that song or the Gary Glitter song Rock and Roll...you know it...it's also called The Hey Song that's played in sports stadiums all over.

So we ended up choosing Gary Glitter, then we all had to get up and clap in some kind of rhythm to it and "Bring it in" which is what we were doing is called. It took all the rhythm this white guy could muster, but I hung with the group. We also played team four square. I swear this is a real job I have. I have also found out that I suck at four square.

But when we got down to talking about the school and the program it was all good. Mark (my boss) talked about a lot of things and used our conversation as examples about a number of things we want to do. Everyone seems to be on board with my ideas for going for a community radio station, a school newspaper (that goes out to the community) and a cable access TV show. Now I just have to figure out how to do all of it.

That was the morning. In the afternoon, I drove one of our big ass vans that we're going to use to schlep kids all over the island. I met another one of the teachers that I'll be working with. She's...um...older, but with more energy than everyone you know put together. I'm not sure if it's her or me or both, but there seems to be a really huge amount of assuming that's been done on what's going to be happening in the classroom - which it's my understanding that humanities-wise, that's my bag. But we'll get it worked out.

I looked at the Hawaii state standards online tonight. And everything I want to do can work with what the state wants. Boy, is the state lucky that worked out. So, I'm sure there's going to be some bumps here and there, but so far everything's pretty damn cool.