I feel that I must apologize in some way for hammering away at Lucia Mar with my very small hammer on Facebook. It’s not that I’m important. I just have a big mouth. I will return to my usual cheerful self, one way or another, soon.

Since I am retiring, I really don’t have much of a dog in this fight: retirement is determined by averaging the last three years of a teacher’s salary, and I would have to make more than Leo DeCaprio this year to make any substantive difference.

But I do not like to see good people get pushed around. I do not like to see them patronized. I do believe that loyalty should always go both ways. I do believe that the teachers in my District are dedicated, compassionate and skilled and I believe most of all that they love children.

I do believe that the District, too, will find a way to get even with me and with others who have called them out. Lucia Mar has a long and well-deserved reputation for vindictiveness, so there’s a good chance that someday soon, a meteor will fall and squash me flatter than a copper penny on a rail. That is the way life works.

From Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons:”

If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we’d live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all… why then perhaps we must stand fast a little –even at the risk of being heroes.

No heroes live here. I am a small and fearful man whose fear is tempered by an Irish temper. People like me, and people far braver than me, must be squashed. We call that Progress.

Before I get too awfully flat, I’ll throw in a photo of me where I have always been at my happiest: in the classroom, with the teens who are your children–and mine, too.

I will now be quiet until I can talk about better things and remind myself that I must not be taken too seriously, no more than the man who rows the Thames taxi carrying More back to his beloved daughter, Meg.