The End is Coming...

...of my vacation that is. School starts back up again next week and I'm starting to get back into teaching mode. It's always weird to start the school year again because for me that happens near the beginning of summer. It's even weirder this time because I attended graduation ceremonies for some of my former students yesterday. They officially ended their high school careers yesterday, while next Tuesday I'll be getting a whole new batch starting their time in high school.
Here are a quick bunch of unscientific statistics (because I didn't take notes yesterday during the ceremonies) for you about Fremont High in south LA. We have about 5,000 students in four grades spread over three tracks (we are a year around school). Entering Freshmen class is usually something a little over one thousand strong. We had a little over 400 students graduate last night. The rest of the students are either progressing normally, or they are "pluses," as in "he is a nine plus" instead of being a 10th grader. Not a technical term really, but when you have enough kids failing too many classes to progress normally, you tend to make up terms to describe it quickly. So doing rough percentages, less than 50% of the students that enter our high school graduate. On the encouraging side, more than 75% of those graduates are planning on attending and have been accepted into a college or university. And of these students, they received an impressive amount of scholarships, grants and awards. I think that the principal said that the total was something like $300,000. I don't know what is typical, but I was impressed. Of course that only works out to be $1,000 per student but since I got diddly squat, I think that they did well.