Take Out the Trash Day

Okay, it has been almost a month since my last post. So, I figure I had better write something. Nothing terribly interesting has happened lately (or I should say nothing that I expect readers will find terribly interesting). I'm just going to write about several marginally interesting things and hope that they add up to a decent post.

My RI class had been getting worse than ever, so I sent a list of the worst offenders and some of their behaviors to the VP. She has been setting up conferences with the students, the parents, herself and myself. For a few of them the parents never showed up. One of them ended with the student being sent directly to Opportunity Room for at least 30 days, and another of the most heinous offenders has been put on a behavior contract. If he screws up at all in the next two weeks, he's going to Opportunity. So far, he has been working hard to keep out of trouble. We will see if he can keep it up. Even if he can't, though, he will be out of my class. So it's win-win for me.

And now for something completely different...

Last year during negotiations, the teachers' union agreed with the district to have weekly after school meetings for up to an hour and a half. (Let it be known for the record that I was not at this district last year and had no hand in this agreement.) The way that it was justified to them was that many of these would be grade level or department meetings, in which the teachers could discuss whatever they felt was important. They really should have gotten that in writing. In the five months of the first semester, there have only been four times available for department meetings. Each other week we have had to attend all staff meetings where information is unloaded on us from the site and district administrations. This week we had our fourth department meeting of the year. The English department at least had been anticipating it, as we have multiple district mandated tests that we needed to plan and discuss. Our principal sent out an email that morning, though. Just in case any of the departments didn't have anything else to talk about, he gave us a list of eleven different topics to discuss. One of these was "Grading (Many F's)" -exact words.

We had our staff Christmas dinner last night. It was at a train station-turned-restaurant in the next little town over. I had never been there before and it was a pretty nice dinner and a comfortable space. I made my husband come with me, even though he hates meeting new people. It turned out all right though. The principal bought a bottle of champagne for each table. It turned out at our table we were seated with a couple of Mormons who don't drink alcohol and two women who had each come by themselves and were driving. I was driving, and my husband doesn't like wine, so no one even had a sip of the bottle which they had already opened. So, that was a total waste. At least, from looking at the bottle, it didn't seem too expensive.

That's all I can think of that won't totally bore you. Hopefully, my job will get more interesting in the near future. Probably not, as we only have two weeks until winter break. Oh well, if it comes to it, I will just start making stuff up.

P.S. If you didn't get the title reference, you need to watch more West Wing.