The Educational Hazards of Snow

The snow day bill is, as far as I know, sitting on Mr. Blunt's desk right now, just calling out to be signed. He may have signed it already, but that was the last news I heard today. The sticking point here is that once he signs it, we still have to play the waiting game, and I don't know if you know this about me or not, but I'm not very good at waiting. We have to wait for the Superintendent to contact DESE to make sure that the interpretation of the bill matches our greatest wishes. Then we have to wait for her to contact my immediate boss, and for him to contact us.

Something you probably don't know about these two people is that their idea of effective and immediate communication does not align with my definition. I anticipate having to wait until Friday or Monday to hear, and while that doesn't seem like a long time, one must remember that we've been waiting since February to find out.

Where's the big problem in all of this? Let's start off with a year fraught with change, add a criminally irresponsible coach to that, and then a great deal of uncertainty regarding the validation of our get out of jail free card. We're a cranky bunch, educators. And maybe you remember your high school teachers when they were cranky. It's not a pretty sight.

But the real problem doesn't lie in our crankiness. It lies in the adapting to ever changing last day dates. There is a huge difference between the final that was supposed to be given on the 17th and the one that might have been given on the 29th. That's three weeks of learning. So, even though we were supposed to give finals on the 16th and 17th, now that it's the 17th and 18th, we feel rushed. Our plans have been so up in the air that many of us just planned on the 29th as an end date. Back to the drawing board.

But back to the crankiness. Today, one of the teachers I work with came into the teacher's lounge ten minutes before the end of the day and our planning period. She sighed and huffed as soon as she saw me, almost simultaneously. Then she starts snarking about how she uses every minute of her planning period and some people just sit on their asses during theirs. Passive-aggressive much?

Instead of outlining the good 75 minutes of work that I did in my 90 minute plan period, and explaining that I had finished everything I could do in that period and I deserved a break, I simply said the following: I'm sorry you feel that way, but think of it this way, if a person accomplishes what they need to accomplish in their planning period and have time left over at the end of the period, then they can reward themselves with some down time. It's your choice not to allot downtime for yourself.

Her response was a diatribe about how she doesn't have a night to herself this week. She has to teach the night course (that she chose to teach), has to go to her son's track meet, has to go to her daughter's ice cream social, and other time-consuming aspects of parenthood. I get it. The last thing I want to do tonight is have to watch a bunch of kids run in circles or throw sticks into the air. But I take issue with the automatic assumption that my life is easier or less laden with have-tos because I don't have children. Let's face it, this is the woman who runs key club, which does after school activities eight days out of the week, and teaches a two hour night course one night a week, and she's talking to the drama teacher and forensics coach (who also likes to imagine that she has a life). It may not come out completely balanced on the scales, but I bet you it comes pretty close.

That pretty much pissed me off just as much as the email I got today that suggests that the reasons students and teachers get shot in schools is because that tricky government doesn't let schools become a place of Christian learning.

It's amazing that I have all this maddening stuff running through my mind, and yet I'm still pretty jovial right now.