Kinda a rough weekend. Last week, out of the blue my wife found out that, no doubt as a result of "budget" pressure from our right-controlled legislature (I won't say any more, I promise), her teaching position and the Adult Ed. ESL (English as a Second Language) program it's a part of was gone and that she'd been "reassigned" to some high school. Both as to the program and her assignment, absolutely zero input was sought from any of the stakeholder students or teachers. Totally top-down axe with no warning.
The sad part of it is, Adult Ed. ESL actually paid for itself and brought in a profit for the school board (there is no school bus transport, or books, or building maintenance cost for the program, which is taught in borrowed UF meeting rooms to students who buy their own books, by teachers who do all of their grading and administrative paperwork from home). So eliminating the program was economically unnecessary, and even counterproductive from a purely monetary standpoint.
My wife has taught in that position for 21 years. As you might expect, she's devastated, and despite all the crowing we hear about "requiring" people in the USA to learn our "official language" of English, doing so for people without a lot of money just got next to impossible in our county.
We're working on what Kim's options are now. She's 6 or 7 years from earliest retirement, and cannot afford to quit. From what I've seen so far, her purported unilateral "reassignment" was probably illegal (in violation of the teacher's labor agreement), but that doesn't bring her old job back.
Saturday-- For me was mainly centered on son's lacrosse activities. Played one game with his team in the early afternoon, they got in a big hole 4-0 and played back to a 3-4 loss. I really wanted them to win as some of the parents on the opposing side were obnoxiously of the "jock" mentality-- dads who were not coaches yelling at players (not their sons) what to do on the field, etc. Ugh. Since this was the first time our Jack had set foot on a lacrosse field, he didn't get much playing time.
It was announced that players could come back later to form a pickup team so that one late-scheduling team would have someone to play against. So we went home for an hour or so between games and cooled off, and he went back and played almost all of the last game, as there were very few subs for the pickup team.
In return for doing the other team (which had 3 or 4 times as many subs) the favor of giving them a game, the other team responded by pouring on points, which in itself is fine, kids can't be asked to not score, but also by a good deal of showboating and grandstanding. Wtf is WRONG with people nowadays? No good deed goes unpunished, I suppose. Fortunately our Jack is thick-skinned when it comes to boorish and unsportsmanlike behavior, and was just glad to get a lot of playing time in. He also got his first red badge of courage, stepped in front of a shot on goal that hit him near his right knee, and he had to be subbed out for a spell. He's a pretty tough kid.
Sunday: skipped playing the "sunrise" service at my church and went to the 9 a.m. service at a closer church on our side of town, as we had plans for the day that going to our church's service would've made difficult. They have an all-contemporary service which Kim (and I) really enjoy. Afterward, we drove over to St. Augustine and had Easter lunch at 1:30 or so in a rather expensive Spanish/Cuban themed restaurant on St. George Street (the blocked-off pedestrian-only street in the old town with many historic buildings on it). Food was good but a smidge disappointing for what we paid (about double what we spend to eat in our favorite family-owned Mexican restaurant at home).
After that we went to our favorite beach at Anastasia. Water temp was a chilly 68F, so we just sat in the sun and enjoyed the cool sea breeze while Jack did some boogie boarding. Got home 7:30 or so, I went and got some pizza, and crashed early. It was a good mini-vacation to let Kim chill out, although by Sunday night she was back to being in tears again. So it goes.