I have a four-day weekend due to the annual NJEA Convention, so I plan to use it catching up on work, including grading three tests I gave today, write some college recommendations, and prepare for next Wednesday’s Morris Area Math Alliance workshop at which I am one of the speakers. My topic is “Preparing students for the HSPA Data Analysis, Probability, Statistics, and Discrete Mathematics cluster.” Since I do not teach that, preparing for it will be more work than I really want to do when I could be working on the Tibet book, which I have not had time to do at all since school started. *sigh*

Yesterday’s elections were interesting, as usual. It was somewhat saddening to see two multi-millionaires slinging mud at each other for several months while pandering to the most selfish aspects of the voters without making any really valid proposals for reforming the state. New Jersey is practically bankrupt, partly because former governor Christie Whitman won two elections by cutting state income taxes and balancing her budgets by underfunding the pensions of state employees (yes, including teachers), so that now there is talk of cutting back all our pensions because the state cannot afford to fund them fully. Teachers are already whipping boys for many of society’s ills, as if we have the magic power to raise children when so many parents have abrogated that role in their unceasing quest for personal pleasure and material gain. Studies have repeatedly shown that teaching is one of the most stressful and demanding jobs in the country, yet since our salaries are paid by taxes we receive little respect and less pay than we deserve. Some of that is balanced by what has been decent retirement packages, but now some greedy taxpayers want to cheat us of that too. Isn’t it great living in such an anti-educational society?