Can I really post from my smart phone?
Cool. Technology can be fun (once you allow for the monthly service charge).
Friday, October 31, 2008
Friday, October 17, 2008
New Math
From the best information I can gather, the new building will house fourteen classrooms. It will sit on dirt that now supports ten classrooms. (I counted). So we will have a net increase of four classrooms. Yay!
We have nine homeless teachers on this campus.
The room that currently serves as the high school office is said to be slated to be converted into a classroom, but I'll believe it when I see it.
It's not as if in an industry like ours we don't have hard demographic data to use to predict future trends. It's not as if we couldn't find something to do with a couple of extra rooms, like move the copiers into one to un-convert the (ahem) freaking teacher's lounge back from a workroom. I can't concentrate to grade papers there because of the clickety-clack, jam-and-smack of Xerox hell: it's a din matched only by the hammers of Vulcan: today I had to leave the room to continue a phone conversation with a parent, (and let's put the butcher paper trolley and other work equipment in there too: I can't even walk to the sink half the time without pushing crap out of the way, and taking care lest I burn myself on the laminating machine) or use one as a meeting room for Student Study Teams that have to meet in storage rooms right now (I've attended several in the middle school office, next to the sink, coffee-maker, and the Giant Ladder of Exposed Computer Network Cables. There's a folding table in there that takes up so much space it's literally impossible to pull a chair all the way out from under the table, let alone walk around when people are seated. It's a coffee room/storage room, and it's embarrassing to have to invite parents in there and try to posture ourselves as professionals with boxes of toilet paper and what-not shoved into the shelves overhead). So any fear of "over-building unnecessary rooms" is ridiculous on its face: we need the conference rooms, we need the classrooms, we need the work room: we've already converted every conceivable space into ad hoc meeting rooms, to an absurd degree.
No, we're so far behind our needs here, it would take two buildings like the coming edifice ex machina that is said to be on plan to float down from heaven as a godsend, to cure all our accommodatory ills. Can a few more portables be asking too much?
Meanwhile, students continue to trash my room while I'm not there, adding insult to injury. I've already asked those kids not to leave their mess in the room. What am I going to have to do, sit in there to watch them?
We have nine homeless teachers on this campus.
The room that currently serves as the high school office is said to be slated to be converted into a classroom, but I'll believe it when I see it.
It's not as if in an industry like ours we don't have hard demographic data to use to predict future trends. It's not as if we couldn't find something to do with a couple of extra rooms, like move the copiers into one to un-convert the (ahem) freaking teacher's lounge back from a workroom. I can't concentrate to grade papers there because of the clickety-clack, jam-and-smack of Xerox hell: it's a din matched only by the hammers of Vulcan: today I had to leave the room to continue a phone conversation with a parent, (and let's put the butcher paper trolley and other work equipment in there too: I can't even walk to the sink half the time without pushing crap out of the way, and taking care lest I burn myself on the laminating machine) or use one as a meeting room for Student Study Teams that have to meet in storage rooms right now (I've attended several in the middle school office, next to the sink, coffee-maker, and the Giant Ladder of Exposed Computer Network Cables. There's a folding table in there that takes up so much space it's literally impossible to pull a chair all the way out from under the table, let alone walk around when people are seated. It's a coffee room/storage room, and it's embarrassing to have to invite parents in there and try to posture ourselves as professionals with boxes of toilet paper and what-not shoved into the shelves overhead). So any fear of "over-building unnecessary rooms" is ridiculous on its face: we need the conference rooms, we need the classrooms, we need the work room: we've already converted every conceivable space into ad hoc meeting rooms, to an absurd degree.
No, we're so far behind our needs here, it would take two buildings like the coming edifice ex machina that is said to be on plan to float down from heaven as a godsend, to cure all our accommodatory ills. Can a few more portables be asking too much?
Meanwhile, students continue to trash my room while I'm not there, adding insult to injury. I've already asked those kids not to leave their mess in the room. What am I going to have to do, sit in there to watch them?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)