Disjointed rambling

Well, it’s lunchtime and I have a few moments of quiet before the upper schoolers come roaring in, carbed up and sugared out.  Today on top of the pep rally energy on campus there is the excitement of the Saints in the Super Bowl on Sunday to contend with.  The students are extra spazzy today.  So I am giving them something to DO rather than something to LEARN.  They are filming videos that they wrote all week using their new vocabulary.  They are often funny to watch and painful to hear, as they butcher my beloved Spanish language beyond recognition.

I talked to my friend, M, last night on text for a while.  He is interviewing with a Big Law firm in Los Angeles and will likely be moving before the summer to start his new life with his new wife.  Who me, bitter?  Nah.  Jealous a little, envious perhaps, but not bitter.  I do wish him the best though I want to claw out her eyes with my fingernails for no reason whatsoever.

I have to clean my room tonight.  It has gotten seriously out of control and I feel like A&E is going to be filming Hoarders in my room soon.  The whole house is a mess, but I’m a realist – I’m only going to get my room clean.  There is no sense in kidding myself.

I haven’t gone running for weeks.  I should.

I can’t seem to get enough sleep.   I am constantly sleepy and all I want to do is lie down, cover up, and snooze!  What’s up with that?  Is it related to the new thyroid medicine I started?  Does it have anything to do with quitting smoking? Am I just a big fat lazy ass?  If I hadn’t just missed about 6 days of work this month for illness/dentist, I would seriously schedule an appointment with my doctor to look into it.  It’s disturbing to be so sleepy all the time.

Papers to grade… so many papers to grade.  I should be doing it right now.

The common thread in my stream of consciousness is that there is so much that I should be doing, but I don’t do any of them.

She graded many papers

On my tombstone it will read, “She graded many papers.”

Not only is it Friday, but it’s also payday.  I’m not sure why I got paid early, but I did!  I’m not complaining.

I hate my job

I recognize that I am particularly grumpy today, which is why I’ll vent here rather than take it out on someone else.  No comments please.

1) I just had to teach a Spanish II student how to look up a word that she should know from Spanish I.  She literally had no idea how to use a Spanish-English dictionary.  Why?  Because they never look anything up, they use their computer for everything.  Our 1:1 laptop program has created the laziest group of students I’ve ever seen.  I think the mandate to use technology is detrimental for things like translations where students need to get out a dictionary and actually look up a word as a part of the learning process.  They get nothing from typing the word into Google and having it spit back out at them in the target language.  I fucking hate the 1:1 laptop program!

2) I don’t give a shit if you were sick last night or if you were playing frisbee.  Turn in your work!!  You had 2 days of class time to do your translation and have 1 paragraph done??!!  WTF?!  No, a note from your Mom stating that you were sick is not going to excuse you from turning in your work.  ARRRRGH.

3) I am pissed that I have to get up extra early and be at work at 6:00 am on Friday so that I can drive an hour into NOLA to visit a school and watch their classes when I am being pushed to get my class through material.  I don’t care one bit to observe another school’s AP Spanish class.  Not a bit.  I don’t teach AP.  We don’t even have an AP program, yet I have to go.  Not happy about that.

I hate my job.  I should not be a teacher.  I don’t like the kids.  I don’t like their parents.  I don’t like grading papers every night.  I don’t like curriculum maps.  I don’t like my administrators.  I don’t like my department chair.  I don’t like my colleagues.  I hate my job.

Hooray for Vacation

One of the only benefits of my job is having a lot of time off.  For Thanksgiving I have 10 days off.  For Christmas I have 14 days off.  In February we have a week off for Mardi Gras and in April we have a week off for Easter.  Having time off has given me hope that I can make it until June. I have to get some things off my chest and then I’m going to focus writing on something other than bitching about work!

Work has been very mechanical.  The students are not as academically solid as I hoped they would be and the parents are a mixed bag.  A decent number of my students in my class are failing because they have not done their homework and have failed a test.  What is baffling to me is that the parents don’t seem to be upset.  I have a daughter who is their age.  I would flip out to know she was failing due to missing homework!  One parent, instead, tried to blame his son’s failure on me, stating that I hadn’t posted grades frequently enough.  I am not sure how his son’s failure has anything to do with when I post grades – he earned those grades, not because I didn’t post them quickly, but because he doesn’t care!  Part of the reason he doesn’t care, as I find out from the counselor at school, is because his parents are divorced and play games with each other.  He is the pawn.  I think Dad needs to point his finger back toward himself, as it seems he is doing more damage than anyone.  Despicable.

One of the hardest things I’ve had to deal with this year is reconciling my expectations of Christian families with what I’m seeing at school.  I wouldn’t expect the high number of divorces and the childish behavior that is hurting their children, that’s for sure.  I have find it difficult to see the students raise their hands to God in chapel every week and then hear about them getting drunk at the LSU game and giving head to boys in the alley.  I read in the Baton Rouge parents magazine that one of the parents at my school is the chair of a purity foundation – she was quoted as saying something along the lines of how important it is for girls to have their fathers in their lives in order to keep daughters pure.  Hers is one of the girls caught with a cock in her mouth.  I wonder if she was more upset that her daughter was on her knees in an alley or that her reputation was being tarnished.  Somehow I think it’s the latter.

So I’m looking forward to having time off, to focus my attention away from work and to myself and my family.  I am excited to do some Christmas shopping.  I am going to take a lot of naps, clean the house, write a bunch on my blog, and generally try to forget all about work.