Of course when I answer the door it's a student of mine from last year who decided that it was the perfect time to go trick-or-treating between classrooms. My limited patience did not allow the proper thought process to ask the most important questions (In what class are you supposed to be? What the hell are our site supervisors doing to let this happen? How the hell did it become an expectation of these kids that they will receive candy from every teacher today?), so I closed the door on her face. She'll get over it.
We began quarter 2 today, marking 25% of the school year being up. Things are going pretty well all things considered, but I still had not imagined this amount of nightly planning to still be plaguing me at this point. You would think that I would be able to reuse material, but I'm really trying this year to transfer everything to computer format so that I can offer the rest of my department my materials by the time I leave. I know it sounds archaic to still be handwriting lessons and handouts, but seriously you should try to format all these equations and geometric figures in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. It takes some serious time. Plus, there are no textbook materials that are scaffolded enough to help my NSH or super low-skilled students. NSH stands for Not Severly Handicapped, which is a level of Special Education one step above a separate day-class. In my 3rd period, 13 of my 39 students are at this level. Basically if I can get through 3rd period unscathed, it has been a successful day.
Of course right now I'm running mandatory tutoring sessions set up by our administration every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, so by 5pm I'm beat regardless. It seems so silly that because of my hard work and effort in this job, I am "rewarded" with more teaching obligations. I'm all for helping my students out, but this school is running me into the ground and I really don't feel like the administration has taken the time to thank us individually for our hard work. They are taking me for granted, but I'm not complaining too much since it eventually gives me an excuse to fall back on for why I'm not coming back next year. Pretty certain about that. I just completed a DonorsChoose project for 12 boxes of paper for our department and upon wheeling the 20-pound boxes around to my math friends I just kept thinking how ridiculous it all is. I just have to get out before my motivation makes a nose-dive, which I predict will happen the moment I see our still-crappy CST scores at the end of the year. Don't get me wrong - I have full faith and confidence in (most of) my students and that fact that I am pushing them way more this year, but I can just feel myself being set up for devastation when things don't change as much as I thought they did. Plus, I keep getting my former students coming to me for homework help and their homework makes me want to march over to the other math teacher and slap them in the face. (In your 10+ years of teaching high school math in California, do you still not know what concepts are and are not tested on the CST and the high school exit exam??? Why are you wasting their valuable time with this nonsense???) Enough of that though.
I've been trying to do and think of other things besides teaching as much as possible to keep me sane and stay happy, so I'll cover the other current events. I'm sure you've already heard about the Occupy Oakland riots; the proximity and intensity of police sirens and helicopters overhead allows me to gauge the situation each evening even before turning on the television. Tomorrow the citizens of Oakland are trying to organize a general strike, which makes me laugh thinking about how taking a day off is harder in most cases than actually sucking it up and teaching a day of school. It's also kind of ironic how I don't make enough money in my job to feel comfortable taking a day off to protest the inequality of financial distribution in our country. It makes me wonder what kind of jobs all of these Occupy protesters have that allows them to take days and weeks off at a time. Maybe it's the fact that I'm so zoned in to my own job, but it seems as though there is so much going on in the world around me to which I really don't even have time to respond. It would be nice to have a job where I have time to actually cultivate a well-informed opinion about current events before they are replaced by new current events... Just a random thought.
Oh, also I wanted to mention the craziness of our school's earthquake drill a week or two ago. It was California's earthquake awareness day, and our drill proved officially that we would all die at school in the five minutes it takes to funnel us all out the back door instead of making the 10 yard walk from my classroom to the strangely labeled "Emergency Exit Doors" (if an earthquake isn't an emergency, I don't know what is). But while inching down the hallway en route to the doors on the other side of the school, I could only smile realizing that it was all par for the course. I figure we still do things like that to create a unique school personality that can never be replicated among any other public schools. The craziness I was referring to was actually the fact that in 6th period that day, we actually had an earthquake that shook the walls a bit, and later that evening another one hit, both between 3.0 and 4.0 magnitude. The timing was eerie to say the least, and I would have forgotten about it if it weren't for another one at 5:30am last week that woke me up. So far I have felt five earthquakes since school began this year, compared to just one in the whole two years prior. Creeped out a little? Me too.
Okay, time to man the candy bowl for Halloween. Do you think they trick-or-treat in this neighborhood?
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