I am a high school teacher. I was trying to avoid that piece of information, but with the recent series of events I decided to cave. The teachers start earlier than the students to get everything ready. There's usually a decent amount of things broken when we get back, but this year has been insane.
First off, they had the water off except in one hall. The water was turned back on not too long after that, but there was very brown water when you washed your hands. Is it sanitary to wash your hands in brown water? I used hand sanitizer in addition to washing but I felt awkward walking out of the bathroom without an attempt to clean my hands.
Several rooms were chosen to have carpet installed this summer, including mine. Is anyone surprised that they had from the beginning of June til Mid August to accomplish this and nothing happened? The carpet was for sure supposed to be installed the day before teachers came to school. The instructions from the custodians: Only put what is absolutely necessary in your room. According to the custodians, that is only the student desks, my smaller teacher desk and chair. And another desk that had piled on top my little rubbermaid pull out drawer holder things (my brain is fried and is not thinking of words well) and another bucket holding staplers, washing bottles, and I'm sure some other things, but I haven't dug down there yet. I have two large tables that I store things on and a nice little bookcase kind of thing with lots of slots to put papers. I have nothing to put anything on up at the front of the class. Nowhere to put the book down momentarily--nada. Consequently, the papers I pass out (which normally go in a closet but are currently holding the calculators I don't have a spot for) end up on the floor, in the tiny space left on the desk with heaping piles and on the two chairs I brought in when I didn't have enough desks for students in third period.
And I found out from the custodian that the carpet wasn't even shipped until August 18th. Seriously what is the deal with that?
The first day back, district workers had cut the cord to the network printer in order to re-wire them. Not having a printer in my room I am now unable to use the copy lady that specifically came in this week to help the teachers.
Oh...the copy room. We have three riso machines (they are amazingly fast and I'm still mesmerized by the speed it shoots out each paper), a normal one that you would typically find in a public library, and then the mother of all copiers (well...it's up there anyways) that only the copy ladies are allowed to use. Take a guess how many are working. Two. The one the copy lady uses and one riso. The normal copy machine is back in business now, but I'm still waiting for the others to be fixed.
The grading program functions well as long as you can get in; which I can't during the day. At night it's all dandy (except for tonight...thus the time to blog). I don't even have a full roll of who is in my class. I have no clue. None.
The weight room was being revamped for safety reasons. It's not done either. Currently the weightlifting class is held on the top bleachers in the gym.
The track was supposed to be replaced. It's almost done. They are hoping it will be done by the first football game, which I believe is this week.
They also decided that textbooks would now be checked out through the library. That means we have to put barcodes on the books and then scan each child. Not too big of a deal...unless the system is so slow a snail could beat it. Originally, the librarians were going to come to our classrooms and check it out there. But the wireless all over the school isn't working (and I happen to know, every room but two get a signal--or at least did when I was over it). Now we have to march the kids down to the library and do it there since it somewhat functions there.
To make matters even more interesting, the librarians computer isn't working and so she is depending on her personal laptop to carry all of this out. What great fun!
I have a smartboard in my room as well. I turned it on and of course it doesn't work either. Another thing to add to the list. Although I can project images, which is better than nothing. My co-worker had his projector sent to the district to get fixed last year and he has yet to see it.
Oh and they reimaged all the computers this summer as well. But upgrading to windows 7 didn't actually work out for a whole bunch of the computers. First problem...windows. Second problem....windows 7. Third problem...old computers.
On the upside of this year we do have all of our student and teacher textbooks--in my department anyways. Last year we started without those.
Speaking of textbooks, another one of my co-workers was finally on the rotation list to get new textbooks for the English department which they haven't had in a really long time. Then the new national core came out. It's not in full swing, but they made her wait to make any purchases until the publishers had a new book out that matched up with the national core, which won't be in full swing for another three years.
Oh and purchases...let's talk about this. The financial manager/accountant lady doesn't have enough time to do probably everything, but there are times I wonder what in the world she does. It takes FOREVER to be reimbursed on anything. And she doesn't understand little explanations about the receipts that you submit. On top of which she losses things. Or someone does. Everyone in the school knows to make copies of every financial documentation you have to submit.
I will say there are more tech people here than I've ever seen at the beginning of the school year. It used to just be me, with two rarely helpful teachers as my sidekicks. Then the school realized that it was insane to have a teacher have one prep period to take care of networking, hardware, purchasing, imaging, the school newsletter, the school webpage, printers, failing notices and midterms and I'm sure some other things I'm forgetting. They hired a full time tech person. And then we got a new principal. We butt heads, so I quit the tech part. Then it was back down to the full time tech and one slightly more helpful teacher. I saw six people in the library having a tech support meeting. And a handful of other people working on pulling cords places. That is, I suppose, one redeeming quality.
Although I must confess on the first day in our classrooms, people kept coming to me because something had gone wrong and apparently felt more comfortable with me fixing it rather than the full time techie. So I spent the first two and a half hours assisting other people instead of anything for my room. It wouldn't be so tragic if everything else wasn't out of order like it was or if the faculty meeting hadn't been three and a half hours long.
So you see what great lengths my school district has gone to make improvements and consequently made a very wretched beginning to the school year.
This is the public school system.
No comments:
Post a Comment