For the remainder of the day, Dan concentrated on reviewing the lesson plans on file and making notes as to those that showed deficiencies, or, worse, were missing altogether. He would schedule his first conferences with these faculty members and get them on the right track. At least four faculty had missing or deficient lesson plans and that would not do. On Friday, he would announce the new required one-on-one meetings and class visitations and would schedule these for the week following their first faculty meeting—giving faculty members at least three days’ notice before a class visitation as a courtesy. The evaluation schedule would be announced at Friday’s meeting—though not the reason they were chosen which would hopefully be obvious to the individuals involved and a first unspoken warning that they needed to step up their games.

Dan remained at his desk and made it a point to be visible several times during the day by taking a stroll on both floors of the school, walking slowly past every classroom and observing from outside the goings on while walking by. When he passed Vanessa Hunter’s classrooms on three different occasions that day, he noticed her sitting at her desk reading while her students worked on assignments in their workbooks or sat at their desks chatting with their neighbors or looking bored. A few were clearly flipping pages on magazines that had nothing to do with the course. Mental note—she would be the first person whose classroom he would visit and the first scheduled in-person meeting. She was also one of the faculty members with shoddy and missing lesson plans.

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His first day ended at 9:00 p.m. after taking a last walk by the classrooms on both floors. He headed home after a 12-hour day on the job—not something he intended to continue doing long term, but he thought it essential to try to lead by example and to simply catch up on the daunting tasks before him. During his subway ride home, he paged through his Computer Shopper magazine, especially the back of the thick issue circling prospective suppliers of inexpensive hardware—and two vendors which purported to buy and sell Apple computers—these he circled, marked with asterisks and dog-eared the page. Too tired to see his girlfriend today, he called her from home while heating up some leftover stew from the previous day. He told her about his day, apologized for being unable to see her and told her that he would likely not be able to see her the following day either as he was going to have a very heavy workload for at least several weeks. But Thursday he intended to leave not later than 5:00 p.m. to buy the fixings for salad and sandwiches to take on Friday for his first faculty meeting. Linda immediately volunteered to help him with shopping and food preparation—help he gratefully accepted. He ate his dinner once it was hot and continued talking to Linda about his day and hers for the better part of an hour, after which he went right to bed, falling asleep almost immediately from exhaustion, but with a genuine sense of accomplishment after his first real full day of work.

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