Day #30

Arrived bleary-eyed and grumpy at work this morning. 6.30am, coffee gone already, trudged upstairs lugging two totes and a backpack full of books and papers and electronic devices.

The door to my room was open. The lights were on. Strange. I locked everything up Friday before I left! Desk drawers all open, cabinets open. Hmmmm. Peculiar. Calculators still there, flash drive still there, document reader, speakers and LCD projector all present. But pens and markers missing? Weird.

Ms. Shaw came in a few minutes later and called me over to her room. "My closet was open and there was a cup by my computer." I sniffed and asked "Do you smell beer?" Her room reeked of stale PBR. I told her how I'd found my room, and we checked out the science class. Again--door open, lights on, drawers obviously rummaged. The chemical closet was open. Ooops.

Turns out somebody climbed the fence in back of the school, pulled a window AC unit out of the ground-floor drum studio, and entered the building. From there they were able to enter several classrooms. Cameras, money, laptops, and miscellaneous school supplies went missing. I'm sure more stuff is missing than we know because teachers are notorious pack-rats and we don't know what we're missing until we need something and try to find it.

Had an audit by the MD Dept of Ed today; they were checking our special education compliance. The auditors spent 2nd period in my room, and the State observer apparently gushed about my performance, and what a great teacher I am because my boss pulled me up after school to tell me so. It's good to know, because I tend to think otherwise. All I did today was hand out copies of Nazi posters, show a clip of Triumph of the Will, and then ask the kids to describe what they saw and make inferences about the purpose of these texts. Then I made them try to define propaganda using their inferences. They came pretty damn close to getting the definition.

The KIDS are smart. I just stand there and call on them when they have questions. The special ed student they chose to shadow all day is an amazing kid, and they were floored by her participation and classwork. All I can say is that were I to select a special ed student from our roster for them to audit, it would have been this child. She is top notch.