Load of Bollix

I’m tired. I am sitting in a mountain of papers that I can’t possibly keep up with and can’t meaningfully grade. Even if it was graded meaningfully with prolonged comments on their writing or their ideas they’d just look at the grade and demand to rewrite it or throw it away on their way out the door (my favorite). There is another mountain waiting to be copied. Technology is the solution. Make a game. Let them use their phone. Go paperless without computers to go paperless. What would that fix? Would they magically start reading on a screen instead of reading a book? I’m racing to a finish line for a state test that measures minimum competency..   When the test is done, babysit. Babysit 160 kids who have been programmed to believe that school ends in mid-May. They’ve been raised on this, so why should they think differently? My students are apathetic and sometimes rude. There’s always random kids running or yelling in the hall. They aren’t ever yelling nice things. Th...

Once upon a time, when I was, like all people in the greater Washington Metropolitan Area, that most-nebulous of jobs—a consultant on a government contract—a colleague gave me a book entitled, “Working with You is Killing Me.” Partly a joke, partly serious, he knew I was having a difficult time working with another person on staff, and he knew it made my working there quasi (full-on) miserable. I freely admit I never faithfully read the entire book, though I have on occasion, over the last ten years, thumbed through its contents--“Change Your Reaction, Change Your Life,” “Fatal Attractions at Work," and my personal favorite “The Business of Boundaries." This book came to mind as I sat at my kitchen table in the daylight-less morning of daylight savings time, reading the BBC, like all normal people at 6 AM on a Saturday. I came across this headline: “ Schools should teach pupils how to spot ‘fake news’ ” If you, like an American teenager, cannot be bothered to re...

My not going to work sends one message only: We have a sub, so we can snap chat in the dark for 90 minutes while an overly dramatic History Channel documentary plays in the background.    If I do go to work, I can do all of the following: Bang my head against a wall, or more often, my desk. Repeat directions for the umpteenth time. Answer stupid questions (they do exist, and you know it). Deal with unending nonsense from other adults that keeps me from doing what needs to be done for the kids. Patiently correct a child when they say something so egregiously ignorant/sexist/racist and they don’t even know it. Provide a space for kids to ask questions about their world in what I hope is a non-partisan, safe atmosphere. Be a female role model who gets shit done. I have no authority. All I have is a reluctant audience of 160 young people before me, but in that I have a stage. I have a platform. I can explain, guide, and impart life les...