Yeah, been a bit busy, but moving ahead

Okay, so I haven't posted in a while. Sorry to disappoint my legions of fans :-)

Call it an excuse, but I will note that I work all weekends in September and most of October at the Maryland Rennaissance Faire . My wife and I sing and play harp. We're listed as Esty's Harp and Voice under Entertainment - Musicians and Dancers. We enjoy doing the Renfaire, and it does pay a tuition payment or two for our daughters' colleges, but the result is that I work seven days a week from just about the beginning of school until the end of the first marking period, so some things just don't get done as quickly as they might.

On to school news! I've been going through the process of getting parental permission to set up monitored email accounts on epals, which is something they require for students under the age of 13. It took me about a week to send those permissions out and get them back, and I created the accounts today. So far, so good, but there is a technical detail or two still to work out. Right now, I'm hopeful that I can exchange my first emails next week. I also gave an overview of the project to my students and asked them to find Brittany (the area in France where our correspondents are) and Belarus on the wall map. I've sent a list of my students to our correspondents, and hope to get similar lists from them soon. Right now, I think the take-home lesson is that these projects just take a while to set up, and one needs to be patient. After all, we've got all year, and it's a marathon, not a sprint.