"Either they don't know, it don't show or they don't care about what's goin' on in the 'hood." -- Dough Boy from "Boyz n da Hood"

Today it was 87 degrees in my classroom at 7:02 a.m. when I arrived and heated up throughout the day. At around noon, the principal was out in the hallway and I expected her to start telling teachers that they had received notice from the system that because of the inhumane teaching/learning conditions, we were being sent home early. Nope. The news soon swept through that the County -- most of which are air-conditioned, I thought -- let out early. After all, we did have Code Red (dangeorus) Air Quality along with the high temperatures.

So we slogged through the day, and this teacher was feeling increasingly light-headed.

This is starting to seem, for me, to be a social justice issue, a haves and have-nots issue, between the county and the city, and between people making decisions in air-conditioned offices versus the people working in conditions suitable to miners.

The other part of me is less certain, though. I grew up in Michigan, and I'm certain we had temperatures in the 90s in school, and we weren't let out. But we started after Labor Day and the heat was never coupled with the sort of humidity we see here in the mid-Atlantic. Plus, there, or at least where I was, there is more land, and my school was one floor. Our schools sits high and has four stories, and each story gets hotter and hotter.

So, yes, we should have been let out.

That being said, I can't believe how good the kids are being. I hope it's not like that scene in The Wire, where they turn up the heat so the kids are more docile, and that they're just polite and wonderful kids that I'm teaching this year. I'm sure the latter! :)