It's Halloween. I had about ten kids in each class and about twenty this afternoon when we went to Hyland Park to play "surviving" games. Mostly, it was about teamwork, trust, and communication and what happens when one or all of those things is taken away. It was pretty fun and the weather was perfect. I was supposed to come home and run but everyone is bailing on class tonight. Andrew is too stressed about work, Sonia wants to have fun, Sara wants to have fun and I feel like sitting around and going to bed early. I'll run tomorrow. Most of my students know what an adjective is by now, which is something.

Because so many kids were absent, we watched a movie on survival techniques. It was hilarious. These redneck good ol' boys showing off their outdoor skills. But the kids were pretty into it. Then, of course there was Earl. Who decided to go off. I can't even repeat what he said. Basically it was a rant against the "rich teachers with their fancy lunches" and what can we possibly teach them about survival? "Miss, give me five bucks and the streets and I'll survive. Doubt you would." He has a point. I just wish he would learn to utter it more appropriately. Sigh.

A parent asked me if I was single and if so could he ask me out. I swear to God. The guy spoke about three words of English. It was hilarious. I can't make this shit up. I had a long line of parents waiting to yell at me because their children failed my class. Great. I got to work at eight, taught all day, tutored six kids after school. went to conferences and now it's 9 pm and I have to start all over again tomorrow. These are the days when I hate my job. Some lady sat in my room for the whole period and observed me. It make me nervous because I know she's the boss of the boss. Why can't people just leave us alone and let us do our jobs? I'm trying a new seating arrangement tomorrow to try to get more kids to pay attention. I wish I was a television set.

Work to Rule. Apparently this is a pre-strike phase associated with labor workers doing their minimal before going out on strike. Apparently, this is what our principal thinks we are doing since we refused to agree to his proposal. This is the first time I've ever felt personally insulted by my boss. 8 of us work an extra hour a day and he wants the rest of the staff to vote on whether or not I should wait around an extra hour to attend a meeting unpaid. He is upset because the staff doesn't want to vote on that because they feel that it's not their right to determine what is right for somoene else? I think he should be delighted that the staff is unified and respectful of each other. To me that shows a tremendous sense of unity, much more so than the divide an conquer mentality of his proposal which is a union-buster of an idea if I've ever seen one. NONE of this has to do (really) with whether or not I'd put in an extra hour. I put in tons of extra hours all year, in fact, I rarely leave before 5 and I am always there by 7:30, but that is MY CHOICE. As soon as someone mandates me to be there, it is no longer acceptable. Especially at the rate of pay I currently earn and the lack of respect my job receives at least within the system. There is a reason we have a contract, and I am so grateful to tbe teachers who fought for it. I realize that these small schools are attempting to break up the union and I only hope that the young, naive, or temporary teachers who intend to leave the industry soon enough don't screw it up for the careerists. I certainly won't. I feel dissapointed in my leader and bummed that he is being petty. I cannot see his pov. I am trying but I sincerely don't see where he is coming from. Why does he think these meetings are so important? It's much more important to me to teach, to see students, to have clubs after school, not to have face time with him or be lectured to about time cards and lateness policies or whatever other inconsistent and unclear system they are trying to put in place. It's simply not what makes us a good school. We're good because the kids come first. it was a sad moment today, and I hope he will calm down and rethink his strategy and not bark at us tomorrow as he did last week like we are children in need of a spanking.

'There's a boat in the middle of my LAB so.." this is how my co-worker starts explaining to me the frustrations he is having with trying to run his biology class. The "marine tech class," come on now, spade is a spade..shop class, didn't get the rented space that they were counting on and so as a result they have reclaimed their old classroom which was turned into a science lab in their short-lived absence. It's a mess, and it's one of so many messes caused by the "small school"=shove lots of kids into an old building, break it up by floors but leave them overcrowded, "solution" offered by the DOE. Other problems include...communal urinals that will leave us all deeply scarred for years to come, desperate measures for teacher privacy including attempts at using bookshelves as room dividers. This is bound to get us all killed or fired as the shelves aren't stable and threaten to come tumbling down any moment now. Did I mention the microwave and coffee pot hidden behing the book shelf as a last ditch attempt at "community" amongst staff or at least a little "break"--mind you this required walling off an entry so that teachers could come in and out of the classroom without distrubing the class that is in progress. Yes, we are completely without space. There is no brilliant solution, unless, as I am convinced some Japanese architects could come in and consult with us on how to Tokyo-ize the school. Beyond this, there is no hope.
Each morning, I have to "reset" the desks from rows to groups of five and then the afternoon teacher has to place them all back into rows again. We have no space for out posters and have hung a clothes line across the window in a vain attempt at finding a spot to hang our reinforcing lessons. It is total madness.
But it's not as bad a having a hlaf constructed boat in the middle of your lab, so I can't really complain now can I?

"There's a boat in the middle of my lab room," hence my poor co-worker G. cannot conduct his science classes very effectively. This is because our "boat-building" course, hey, let's call a spade a spade, shop class, was not able to move to another facility as planned and once again our over-crowded, triple-teacher to a classroom situation has rendered the day absurd.

Are other floors this crowded? Well, the newest school to the campus, the school that presently has only a 9th grade class, as with us, they will grow a new class each year. They have a HUGE floor. We were given no additional space because we are moving "any minute now". This has been the story for four years, and I'll give an "A" to the first bureaucrat to get us out of the hell hole that is our present state.

There are tensions among the staff and the principal and a.p.--our scheduled is taking advantage of the "we're a small school" philosophy and requiring beyond "above and beyond" and people are feeling pissy about it. Rightfully so. People above and below us are paid for extra meeting time while we're supposed to come because "face time" is important. Once in three years, I learned something from one of these meetings. But I forgot what it was. Most of the time, someone barks until we wimper and cover our ears with our paws.

Not that the teachers are a bunch of heroes either oh no. In the teacher's lounge today, I watched as our tech rep, my personal hero, debugged a computer because someone had been downloading crap videos and who knows what else. Earlier in the week, I watched a teacher print 200 pages of nonsense using up a laser toner while the teacher behind her waited to print out...her real estate prospects. Thank G. for the union?

Yes, because without the union, our boss would require daily face time until, who knows? 6:30 every night and there would be nothing I could do about it. As it stands now, our union is getting fragmented and the whole divide and conquer approach makes me nervous. How kind that they are willing to negotiate so that we don't have to come in on MLK Jr. day. Can you say distractor anyone?

My students, meanwhile, think I am an evil cow for imploring them to learn vocabulary words, read outside of class, and yes, dare I say it, think for themselves. Worse still? Act civilly towards one another. Yikes. Today was mild though because many of the louder cagey children fled the coop.

I read in the Times this weekend about some neighbors who, after much coaxing from a reporter, admitted that a certain student (later indicted for a crime) had "practically dropped out of high school,". The article went on to claim that people saw this child as mean spirited, vengeful and aggressive. Why is it acceptable to read about a kid practically dropping out of high school and in the same breath telling schools that they have no right to isolate disruptive, violent, aggressive children or suspend them or re-locate them to a facility prepared to deal with them? I don't get it. This is why our classrooms are such messes. We have to have every single kid come in, day after day, no matter how disrespectful or how many times an offense has been enacted. The best we can hope for is a two day suspension, which just makes everything worse because he (yes, almost always he) comes back even further behind and more angry.

I have a student, much like the one described above, who hates women. He is a totally different person with a male teacher but with me, he is rude and downright vile. I hate having him in the room because I can't wash his mouth out with soap and it makes me sick to listen to him. But he'll be there again tomorrow and the day after that and the following week too.

Teachers come to my room to make coffee in the morning and we share a small refrigerator. There is a steady steam of coffee traffic and the kids are all begging for some by 3rd period. Again, if only we could have enough space for a little privacy.

But we can't, and I wonder if we ever will.

Everyone has a DOE e-mail address. No one uses it. Think of the 8 track. Or the station wagon. Now think of the quill pen and the bottle of ink. Now you are nearing the utility factor of the DOE email address. Today, the Principal informed us that we had to access it. Not on a regular basis, but for an experiment. This meant calling the help desk. The DOE help desk. Picture a mail order catalog company that has nothing to sell but loads of investment capital. Bluetooth wireless headsets and ergonomic chairs and way too much time on their hands to actually do anything. Picture row after row of these cubicle tie wearing, robots. Picture them asking you for your password when that is what you are calling to get. Picture them telling you that they can't hear you as you SHOUT your name in the teacher's lounge causing whiplash to everyone who is in the room attempting to get their own work done. Picture the futility of it all, thirty minutes later when you log on only to discover that you have no e-mail. Try changing your password for the next time you have to do this. I dare you. It can't be done.

After school a student and I sang the twenty-three helping verbs as a way to make sure she was ready for her quiz tomorrow. It was the perfect end to a perfect day. All four of my classes went well. Was it that the book on tape was better to listen to than my reading voice? Was it the clipboards nailed to the wall that my collegue drilled in for me before I'd even arrived at school? Was it just my attitude? I did decide not to let things get to me. I decided that what mattered most was not that every second was a learning moment, but that the chaos was controlled. I let some of the foul language slide, I let some of the innappropriate behaviors go in the name of getting some of the work done. And some of the work did get done. Not all of it. Not enough to compete with the rest of the world, the one outside the lives of kids who are more worried about violence than numbers, but enough to make me take stock a moment and say, yeah, this was a good day.