Monday, October 27, 2008

Enter favorite cuss word here


This is a rant mostly unrelated to screenwriting and totally about my job.

Today is the first day back after eight weeks of vacation. Yay vacation! The kids are terrific and the school has just instituted a new tardy policy that appears to have reduced our truancy problem to a negligible amount. Yay again.

Now for the first time we have a newspaper adviser. She's in what is normally my room. I spent two years finding computers and installing software in that room so that my kids could do yearbook and now it's her room. I am in a room with one computer. One.

I knew this was going to happen so I began to work on the problem last April. I typed up a journalism program curriculum and Newspaper Adviser lady signed it. That's all she did. I submitted it to lots of people and nothing happened. So I came in during vacation one morning and she and I met with the principal where I stressed my need for computers and the principal talked mostly about the newspaper.

As we left the meeting a colleague said we should submit the proposal the following Monday at a committee meeting where the committee is trying to figure out how to spend a bazillion gazillion dollars they evidently have lying around. So I said Yay and then I said oh wait because I was to be in Puerto Rico at that time. So I asked Newspaper Adviser if she would go to the meeting and give them our proposal and explain that we need computers desperately. And she was all "Oh sure! No problem!"

I got into my new classroom Friday where there is still one functioning computer. One.

I went next door to Newspaper Adviser and asked her how it went with the committee and was I getting my computers.

"Oh I could't go," she said. "I have class that night."

And of the computers I obtained and installed software on in her room - the ones I begged borrowed and stole - one of them doesn't work because one of her students stole the mouse. That means she has been letting them use the computers with no supervision.

I don't really know what I'll do in yearbook class today because I have no computers and I don't know how long it will be until we have them. Maybe my students and I can all sit around and stare at each other and discuss what it's like to watch deadlines zoom by.

7 comments:

  1. ugh. That was so lazy and unresponsible of that newspaper lady to do that to you. One computer for at least 30 students is a big nightmare. jesus.

    i hope you find a solution.

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  2. just in case some of us might have machines sitting in closets that our wife keeps asking us why we're saving them...

    what would be a minimally acceptable system for your student's needs?

    does the school have a mechanism for accepting goods as a donation?

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  3. I don't know what our charity process is. I'll ask around.

    I may have found a way to get us our computers, but it may take a couple of weeks.

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  4. Incompetent people are assholes.

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  5. As a high school English teacher in China, I've come to learn from you.

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  6. Oh my. I'm not sure if that's good or bad.

    Good luck with that. I heard Chinese kids sit still and listen. Is that true?

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  7. Extremely true. If they don't, he/she may be to blame from the teacher or his/her parent(s)

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