9th Grade Open House

Today was the big day of the open house for ninth graders and things went quite well. I didn't get a head count on how many families ultimately showed up, but the ballroom in the union was packed with people during the opening presentation and lunch. There's also the list of names of families we had to turn away because we were caught off-guard by the momentous response we received. If we have anywhere near this level of interest next year, we will certainly continue to expand our open house efforts.

(To give some context, we've had open houses several times a year, but up until this year, we only focused on 10th grade students. Since some students learned about our program only a couple months before our application is due, there were some families that couldn't make the academic requirements work. For example, some students couldn't fit Geometry into their schedule or take the ACT in time for the application deadline. So, one of the major benefits of meeting with younger students is to give students time to fit most/all of our requirements into their tenth grade year.)

I got a few comments during the day from co-workers about my presentations. If it was going on display in a few weeks, I would probably do some fiddling with the pictures, but I still thought that it came together nicely. While this was our first attempt at an open house in the format we used, everything went quite smoothly and I picked up on a lot of positive vibes from the visiting families.

Of course, with this event taking the full efforts of the staff, today was a long day for my fellow RC's and me. Fortunately, I was a timekeeper during the time for breakout sessions, but even still, I've been in work mode from 8:15am to midnight, excluding a couple of hours in the afternoon. I worked the front desk and it was the first time I felt genuinely tired at the desk in a while. Sadly, I'm not feeling that same level of exhaustion while I type this... darn you second wind when I should be asleep already. At least tomorrow doesn't hold anything out of the ordinary before lunch. Tomorrow is our prom and while I'm working the desk during that time, a lot of students are going to be in full-out prom mode from the afternoon on.

TC

Holidays. Since I knew I'd be wrapped up in open house stuff, I knew that I really couldn't focus on a holiday today. Child Care Provider Day was today - May seems very family oriented, in addition to it simply being Family Wellness Month. Here's a question - would it be too much of a stretch to attribute today to Public Service Recognition Week? The website on the holiday states it wishes to "honor the men and women who serve our nation as federal, state, county and local government employees" and as an employee of a publicly-funded state university, my co-workers fall into this, right? (Small example, but when I go on competition trips, hotels only charge me the State Government rate, so that's something.) If people are on board with this, I feel like the whole open house was our way of recognizing ourselves to a larger population. At times, it can be surprising when there are large schools/areas that still haven't heard about our program.

If you want me to give you another holiday, May is Prepare Tomorrow's Parents Month, and today was designed to inform parents about our program. So there. Ha.

TC

Just as a brief thing, but I've started to be more outward with my nerdfighter identity, and I've enjoyed it thus far. I found out one of my close high school friends is a big nerdfighter who gave me some ideas on how to get more involved in the community. There are also some people on campus that are openly nerdfighters (at least in the Adult Nerdfighters Facebook group), so it's comforting to know I'm not the only one in Maryville. It would be really cool to try to attend some type of gathering or convention, but there aren't any "oh my gosh you need to go to this in July" events that I'm aware of just yet.

TC

In the past few minutes, I've had to go back to previous sentences and add in words so that the sentence actually makes sense. I'm taking that as my cue to wrap things up and go to bed. Good night all. DFTBA.