…from Charlie’s Coffee Bar in Richmond, IN…yay free WiFi. I’ve just pulled together my talk for tonight, and have a bit to relax before I get taken to dinner with my very generous host.

I spoke at Seton High School, which surprised me by having a lot more 7th and 8th graders than I expected. Hmmm. Okay, shift gears just a bit. Can do.

A rather neat little small world moment – it was, as I suspected, and verified when I asked, a high school at which one of my former HS principals in Florida (and there were several at that school…sigh. But he was the first, the fellow who hired me) had worked after he left FL. I thought I’d seen something in some Catholic paper about this school – it just started a few years ago – and he was there as its first new principal.

Seems like a nice school, rebirthing from the remnants of a old, closed Catholic school that started out as a high school, then became a grammar school, closed and is now re-opened. The library is gorgeous – with huge, original stained glass windows that my host said everyone had basically forgotten about in the years the school had closed…good news for once!

BTW, one of the conversations I had with this particular principal which sticks in my memory is an end-of-the-year comiseration in which we were trading stories of low expectations, and he said, "I’ve never been in a place where parents pay so much and want so little in return." As in…all they want is the diploma from the private school. Who cares if they learned! Bah! Just give ’em the decent GPA and the piece of paper and let’s move on!