March 22, 2012
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1 Back to normal, if there is such a thing.
2 I love that I have slowed down my planet this past month. During Christmas I felt almost as though someone had kidnapped me.
3 I had so much stuff hitting me so many different ways that something had to give.
4 It took a school lockdown for me to stare down all the pressures that kept coming at me in the form of really good people who wanted me to do things, to be at meetings, to do special projects, and all the rest.
5 Individually, each person was great.
6 Collectively, they began to become a nightmare of time management.
7 I won’t go into details about the lockdown; I’ll just say that when we went into what traditionally is known as a “Code Red”, I became scared to death. Rumor was that there was a shooter on our campus who was going to “shoot up the school.”
8 I had been left what looked like a death threat two days before. It was quite real and quite frightening.
9 It turned out to be an innocent coincidence. There was no incident that day, and life returned to normal for most of the school.
10 Not for me.
11 I decided that a whole lot of trying to please everybody and his or her brother had taken my life away from me.
12 I have no idea how I turned it all around, but I was able to lessen my workload, find more time for family and friends, and let people at work who were pressuring me from all angles to take a back seat.
13 I started eating better, playing guitar, singing, seeing people I needed to see, spending time with my family, and even joining the spring musical, which has been a bit of a godsend.
14 The other day, the internet crashed at the school. I had just graded a bunch of papers and was unable to enter them into the gradebook. This usually results in insta-emails from parents and students demanding that they know their child’s current grade. It also keeps me from seeing any emails. If I’m in the school’s theater building at night I can’t get the internet anyway. So it is easy to get backed up in both grading and in knowing that people want you to respond to them.
15 Fortunately I got a jump on this grading period, and already have around ten assignments posted for this six weeks, enough to give a rough idea of how the students are doing.
16 But this weekend I’m going to be at Dad’s, and he doesn’t have the internet either. I won’t be able to post grades until Sunday.
17 I love it.
18 Moving on, Part 1: Yesterday we had union elections. Long story, won’t bore you with it, but I had to be at a union meeting from four to six. I was told during my last class of the day that I was to take the ballots to the union meeting. Another teacher had them and was to hunt me down at my department meeting and deliver them. But we changed rooms, so twenty minutes before the meeting I was with no ballot box. Finally the lady who had them called me. She was nearby so we made the exchange.
19 Fair enough. But once there, I was handed some forms about the proper way to count ballots.
20 Mind you, I don’t mind doing this stuff, it was just sort of thrown at me at the last minute, no warning. I’m happy to serve as a rep, but I do like a little notice before this stuff happens.
21 And I know as a “rookie” I have to do some grunt work. I don’t mind that either, but I missed most of what was going on because I had to count about six billion ballots. They were endless, which is a good problem to have. I just wish I had been forewarned. I did check my emails yesterday to see if anything was going to ambush me, but saw nothing. The teacher who had the ballots told me that she had emailed me, but I don’t remember seeing her email.
22 I rolled up my sleeves and took to the task, but it sort of bothered me that I could only marginally listen to what decisions the district and the union had made, because I was trying to learn a sort of brand new mini-job on the fly.
23 I had also just gotten out of an English meeting in which I was given the task of writing a large chunk of the English 2A Shakespeare test. to be given at the end of the semester. We were to each take a play and write up a passage and some corresponding questions for a sort of benchmark test we will launch next year.
24 Fair enough. I am an expert at Taming of the Shrew and Midsummer, told them that, so they gave me Twelfth Night. Huh?
25 I LOVE Twelfth Night, don’t get me wrong, but am clearly much more familiar with Shrew and Midsummer. Why would you give a guy the task of doing something that he has no real working knowledge of?
26 I don’t know if that makes any sense, since Twelfth Night is an awesome play. It’s just that my experience with the show is having watched and enjoyed it by several companies over the years. I read it once, long ago, but really, I have both Taming of the Shrew and Midsummer practically memorized.
27 So in one day, greatness was again thrust upon me. Counting ballots was fine, it was just that I missed most of the meeting because I was blind-sided without warning. I realize that as a newbie, I have to get in there and do the dirty work, but having this stuff handed to me twenty minutes before the meeting was a bit strange. Had I known a week ago, I could probably have figured out a way to multi-task it; I’m not stupid.
28 Counting ballots isn’t difficult, just not knowing the proper protocol was. What happens to people who sign in but not next to their names, for example? Do those votes count? That sort of thing. Can the entire election be canceled if I miscount the ballots? Probably not, because they must have a system of checks and balances. I just didn’t know any of it.
29 So it wasn’t difficult; it was just learning the right way to do things with no proper training was a bit irritating, and distracting. I couldn’t listen to the issues because I was pre-occupied with figuring out the basics of ballot counting.
30 After I send this grousing DN off, I’ll check my emails. I guarnatee that woman’s email is probably sitting there unread. I was pretty much in front of students all day yesterday except for my prep period, but I was hungry and took off to get some food.
31 So that’s pretty much yesterday, and the quickness with which my time can get captured. I have to enter all those grades, write two vocabulary lists, grade a few things this week and have all of that done by Friday.
32 I also overslept this morning.
33 And I STILL expect to have a great day, probably will because we are at mid-range with Midsummer, and a lot of the students are laughing and enjoying it for the first time in their lives.
34 It was just amazing watching how people swipe time from you without even realizing it. “Yeah, I’ll do Twelfth Night,” I said, even though I must have said, “I’m really familiar with Midsummer and Shrew.”
35 Okay, it’s late in the morning. I gottago. I’m actually in a good mood; I was just trying to see how sudden storms of work appear in my life. I watched it happen yesterday.
36 AnywayZ…
37 Have a good one. We’ll see you soon.
38 Peace.
~H~
