Safety in Numbers

I spent most of my morning sending emails.

I've been watching my class rosters, and right now they break down like this:

Period 1 - Advanced Drama - 5 kids
Period 3 - Drama 1 - 16 kids
Period 4 - Speech - 17 kids

I keep thinking that it's me, that they hate me. I know I shouldn't take it personally, that it's ridiculous to take it personally, but that's still where I go first.

What's odd is that my drama classes 2nd semester are all in the mid-20s, a fine number for this school. I don't know why the fall would be so much lower. I talked to the counseling secretary. She wasn't sure what was going on, either, but she did say that the school's numbers are down overall.

Because I know a lot of my fellow-teacher-friends will get a kick out of these numbers, the senior class this year is 134 students. The other three grades range from 87-95 kids each.

Crazy, huh?

Naturally, everyone's class sizes are down. It still doesn't explain why that drama class is so dang small, and if I don't get a lot more kids to sign up for 1st period they're going to drop the class.

Oh, also? I'm going out of town all of next week. So if they do change the class, it would happen while a sub is managing my classes. Which makes writing sub plans interesting.

So I sent out a lot of emails this morning.

I went through my rolls from last year, looked up a lot of email addresses, and wrote to the Drama 1 kids from last year who should be in that class. I told them the truth - that I enjoyed having them in class and that I would like it if they were in my class again.

I wonder how it would have felt when I was in high school if I had gotten an email from a teacher telling me that he/she wanted me, me personally, to be in a class. Then again, my graduating class was just under 800 students. Things go a little bit differently at a school the size of MTHS.