Day 17

My wife was a classroom teacher for a decade before moving on to non-profit land, so I knew about the endless contradictory and useless meetings to which public school administrators subject their staffs. According to our contract we are supposed to get 30 minutes for lunch every day, and we are supposed to have 90 minutes of free planning time a day to do our filing, our grading, our attendence, our phone calls, our paperwork, our planning, etc. Let's just say that ain't the way it works. I get ten minutes for lunch if I'm lucky, and I have yet to get a minute of my planning time because there's always a mandatory meeting scheduled during planning time. Yesterday my sixth grade team-mates and I thought we had no meeting and we were excited because we thought we could actually meet with each other to do some planning and get on the same page. But then we were paged to a last-minute meeting. The first item on the agenda? A fifteen minute discussion by administrators about how there were too many meetings.

Tomorrow I have a mandatory professional development about using technology in the classroom. Fuck that. We had this professional development ten times last year. All they ever get to is how to login to email and how to turn on a fucking LCD projector. They can suck it. So I'll sit there for an hour not getting my work done, and then after school I have a mandatory meeting for an hour (again, our contract states we are required ONLY to attend a SINGLE after-school faculty meeting per month--this will be the THIRD after-school event I'm attending this month).

If I actually got to use my planning time I might not have to work these ten-hour days every day, including Saturdays and a few hours on Sundays. I'm not holding my breath, however.

Yesterday the Big Cheese held me after school to talk to me about inaccuracies on my attendance. "Some of the kids you mark absent are actually tardy," he said.

"Well, you told us to hand in our attendance by 8:15. Many students come in later than that. If they come in later than that I have already marked them absent."

"That is an inaccuracy on a legal document. Hold your attendance until 8:30."

"If I don't turn it in by 8:15 Mr. Mac comes and yells at me."

"I AM THE BOSS!"

"Yes, sir."

So today I had my attendance at 8:16 and I was changing a couple absents to tardies when Mr. Mac opened my door and screamed at me for not turning in my attendance on time. I did what I always do in the face of moronosity--I smiled. And then blogged about it.

The full moon this week launched the student body into lunacy across the board. The Book this week looks like the Book last year all of a sudden. They better get this shit nailed down quick. Teachers are starting that old calling out every day trick. Mr. T across the hall has already used 2 weeks of sick time. Mr. W laughs about this every day. "He ain't gonna make it Mr. G. He on his way out."