The school year is kicking off for real now. I got my first call from the sub caller last night. Alas, she informed me that it may well be my last call from her as well. She and her two associates have all resigned from this assignment, due to changes and complex requirements that were imposed on them for not much compensation. That has to be a terribly stressful job anyway, having to fill all the openings of all the absent teachers every day of every month. They make calls until late at night and start again at 5:45 am. And then they go to their regular jobs.
So I am working Friday and Monday mornings, and all day on the 23rd. I'll be happy to see the paychecks, but I'll be even happier when they start to fill in a little more. The end of summer is always hardest, coming off of birthdays, vacations, and end-of-summer party mode. By Christmas I usually recover, and then spend it all all over again.
I still have not heard from Useless Sir Guidance (hereforth known as USG). I have been emailing Brian's teachers at a rate of one per day, because it exhausts me to repeat myself, but I don't want to send them all the same impersonal note. I was waiting on USG, but since he never deigned to call me, I decided to make the science teacher my email of the day for yesterday. I explained a little about Brian's condition, and then said that I hoped the binder he was using for math and science would be ok. She wrote back: "his binder is fine. And if you feel it is a burden, we can work something out."
Huh? What happened to the two inch dedicated binder, and Brian's permission to show up late for his Spanish class so he could put that binder back in his locker? First of all, I know Brian would never have done that. The last thing he wants to do is draw MORE attention to the fact that he is different and weaker than the other students. Second, WHY was it such an argument on the phone with USG that I had to get myself all upset, and still not have heard back, when in actuality, the teacher is perfectly willing to work with us? What is the point?
Anyway, I have met a few people in response to my post on the forum, of course I had to discount the half dozen or so suggestions that I get Brian a rolling backpack, but most have come through with good thoughts and words of encouragement. It's really important for Brian to do well this year, because he didn't do so well last year. If he is going to go to a different high school for a fresh start, he is going to have to have a good first marking period. If he is not,, and he is going to the public school, he is still going to need to do well, in order to be placed in the highest level of classes possible. Honors won't be an option freshman year, but he can perhaps work towards that. But I certainly won't stand for anything below the next level down, which is called "college prep."
In other news, the weather is lovely and is forecast to remain that way through tomorrow. The girls at HS South will be happy about that, as they have picture day this week. Megan's is today, and E's is tomorrow. It always helps when picture day is a good hair day. Brian starts his swim team practices today, but he has to go to the orthodontist first. Megan starts tomorrow. And so begins my life of taxi driving!! I have already researched crock pot recipes. In fact, I think I need to start one cooking right now. :-)
Showing posts with label stupidity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stupidity. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Thursday, June 19, 2008
School's Out for the Summer!!! o/ o/
The last day! It's here and it's over! And it is beautiful outside. Brian is at a party (not much of one, thank God, I was worried about the guest list but most of the ones I worried about decided it would be too boring and didn't go) and Megan is at the Y teaching the week-long Learn to Swim lessons and then practicing afterwards. It's very quiet in the house, and Puff is even out. She just hopped down from the window, but she is ignoring me, pretending not to hear.
It was a fairly uneventful week aside from one inappropriate comment made by a 5 year old yesterday, I told the counselor about it and the little girl was sent home. Nobody really seemed too affected today, she was back and seemed as happy as could be. I hate when things like that happen on my watch, but I couldn't just ignore it.
This morning we had a brief power reduction (not quite outage) and the carbon monoxide detector was going off in the basement. I unplugged it and went out for a walk. There was a dead mouse in the driveway! I passed a fire truck responding to a call about a neighbors CO detector. I cut my walk to two miles and came home to find the dead mouse was nowhere to be seen, and the lights were back on. I put the CO detector back in the basement, and it's been fine. The only problem is that there is another chipmunk in the pool, as well as a big dark spot by the drain. Gah. I want to go sit out there and read my book, it's so beautiful out, but I don't want to scoop the munk (or munks!), but I don't want to know it's there, either.
The big news is that they have reopened one of the roads that was closed about six weeks ago in town. It was slated for these HUGE improvements, which one would assume were done to improve traffic flow. Well. I just sat in traffic for ten-plus minutes to go through a light that would normally have taken three or four at the most. About five lanes of traffic were all trying to get into one lane to make a left turn for the Parkway. Ridiculous. These people call themselves engineers and planners!?! Maybe their goal was just to make people hate that area so much that they will continue to find alternate routes, thereby cutting down on bothersome traffic in residential areas.
In other news, everything is pretty mellow for now. Megan got her letter from the summer program so we know she will be in a class with autistic kids, probably 2nd and 3rd grade or so. It should be a good class. I spoke to my board neighbor briefly this morning and she told me she is working with Dr. NoCallBack and they are "doing everything they can". I found this odd, as she had also been gung-ho about it when last we spoke.
It's like Dr. NoCallBack has some big concern, that she can't tell me about, but she tells all my supporters and then they become non-committal about the whole thing. All I know is that if they end up rejecting it, after all of the hoops they made us jump through and all their rude inattention to our messages, emails, and calls, I will be furious. Not even so much because we won't be able to host the student, but because this will have taken nearly two months, wasted the time of the two ladies at the agency, wasted my time, gotten my kids' hopes up, and, most of all, wasted the time of poor E, who has done nothing but apply for a year abroad. This is honestly the most blatant display of inefficiency I have experienced so far in this district; and if they reject her, I think I will send my letter straight to the superintendent. If there is something missing, we have not been made aware, if there is a concern, nothing has been said. They just seem content to drag it out forever, which implies that they are processing the information; but something nags at me that there is more to it than that.
It was a fairly uneventful week aside from one inappropriate comment made by a 5 year old yesterday, I told the counselor about it and the little girl was sent home. Nobody really seemed too affected today, she was back and seemed as happy as could be. I hate when things like that happen on my watch, but I couldn't just ignore it.
This morning we had a brief power reduction (not quite outage) and the carbon monoxide detector was going off in the basement. I unplugged it and went out for a walk. There was a dead mouse in the driveway! I passed a fire truck responding to a call about a neighbors CO detector. I cut my walk to two miles and came home to find the dead mouse was nowhere to be seen, and the lights were back on. I put the CO detector back in the basement, and it's been fine. The only problem is that there is another chipmunk in the pool, as well as a big dark spot by the drain. Gah. I want to go sit out there and read my book, it's so beautiful out, but I don't want to scoop the munk (or munks!), but I don't want to know it's there, either.
The big news is that they have reopened one of the roads that was closed about six weeks ago in town. It was slated for these HUGE improvements, which one would assume were done to improve traffic flow. Well. I just sat in traffic for ten-plus minutes to go through a light that would normally have taken three or four at the most. About five lanes of traffic were all trying to get into one lane to make a left turn for the Parkway. Ridiculous. These people call themselves engineers and planners!?! Maybe their goal was just to make people hate that area so much that they will continue to find alternate routes, thereby cutting down on bothersome traffic in residential areas.
In other news, everything is pretty mellow for now. Megan got her letter from the summer program so we know she will be in a class with autistic kids, probably 2nd and 3rd grade or so. It should be a good class. I spoke to my board neighbor briefly this morning and she told me she is working with Dr. NoCallBack and they are "doing everything they can". I found this odd, as she had also been gung-ho about it when last we spoke.
It's like Dr. NoCallBack has some big concern, that she can't tell me about, but she tells all my supporters and then they become non-committal about the whole thing. All I know is that if they end up rejecting it, after all of the hoops they made us jump through and all their rude inattention to our messages, emails, and calls, I will be furious. Not even so much because we won't be able to host the student, but because this will have taken nearly two months, wasted the time of the two ladies at the agency, wasted my time, gotten my kids' hopes up, and, most of all, wasted the time of poor E, who has done nothing but apply for a year abroad. This is honestly the most blatant display of inefficiency I have experienced so far in this district; and if they reject her, I think I will send my letter straight to the superintendent. If there is something missing, we have not been made aware, if there is a concern, nothing has been said. They just seem content to drag it out forever, which implies that they are processing the information; but something nags at me that there is more to it than that.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Is It Really Only Tuesday?
This week is creeping by. Today I had to work all day in a resource room. The thing about the resource rooms is that they have very few kids, but the kids are all at such different places that there might as well be 100 of them. Luckily, in this class, one of the kids has a para (personal aide) so there was an extra person in the room. The other thing about the resource rooms is that they group the kids by relative grade level, so you never have just one grade at a time.
The push for next year is "inclusion". The latest trend in education thinking is that special ed and resource kids will do better if you mainstream them, but give them in-class support in the form of a resource teacher. I have heard that there will be no resource rooms next year, and the resource room teachers will "co-teach" in selected regular ed rooms. I have also heard that the elementary schools will only hire new teachers with dual certifications in special ed. There are so many kids who can't keep up in school today. I don't know if it's No Child Left Behind, vaccines, or just our society, that teaches 'to the test'. These are all reasons that I don't think I would ever go back to school for my degree. I've seen too many do it, and they're all still out there, searching.
At the end of the day, one of the special ed kindergarteners had some sort of medical incident and was sent to the hospital in an ambulance! They said he had a seizure, and he had a low grade fever, but his poor teacher was waiting by the door in tears. She is two days from her last day before maternity leave for her second child, with the first being not even two years old. She has one of the roughest classes in the school, with only ten kids (!), and then this had to happen. So hopefully he will be OK. I like this kid, despite himself. He's quite a character, and very smart, so I'm not sure what his classification is. Maybe he's mildly autistic. When I was in the class last week, he said to me, " I don't want to do math. It's boring." And he's six! (I have to admit, it probably his - he is capable of much more than calculating how many apples go to each child when there are six apples and two children)
So otherwise the day was OK, just a little long and I had one kid that couldn't understand me no matter what. It went like this:
Me: there are 36 inches in a yard. How many inches are there in a yard?
Kid: (looks intently at book): Um. One?
This happened in reading, too:
Me: The main idea of this story is getting energy from the wind and the sun. What is the main idea of the story?
Kid: Um. Windmills?
And that was that. Luckily you have pull-out only for an hour in the morning for reading and for forty minutes for math in the afternoon. And I haven't been in this class a whole lot, so I don't know the kids as well as I do the 4th and 5th grade resource kids - who are - by the way - much farther along.
After that, I spent an hour and a half on the phone with the AT&T customer service people. It seems that the place where I bought my cell phones and have changed the plans over the past, oh - I don't know - 12 years? - has been going into the system and making changes to my plan. I have caught the changes, but no rep has bothered to help figure out how until today. This one looked it up and saw that thay had even entered a false drivers' license expiration date, and changed my plan. They actually screwed everything up, because they changed Megan's line to the main line, and they did away with my texting ability completely, which it took me a few days to realize. I just thought everyone was ignoring me all weekend.
So she corrected everything, gave me a credit for the month's fees for my troubles, and said she would register a complaint against the franchise, which is privately owned. She also made a change so only corporate stores can change my account, or I can do it online. That's just insane. I guess they're compensated for new services sold, like the time they put roadside assistance and voice activated dialing without my permission. Jerks.
And there was my day. Brian is searching for Ralph S. Mouse so I can find out how Ralph does in The Great Mouse Caper, as I have read three chapters to this resource group and am dying to know how it turns out. He doesn't seem to have it. Now he is talking about Mr. Popper's Penguins.
And finally, in other news, Megan has come down with the sniffles. I gave her the last of her prescription decongestant, but this seems to need more than that. She is in good spirits, but she's trying to get out of going to school. She also informed me that her math grade has dropped to a plain A. So she won't be #1 in her class after all. Oh, there go my hopes and dreams. It's because of the week missed for Nationals, she got two 86's on tests. Sigh. Brian's baseball team lost tonight, again, 6-3. He had an error on first, a few strike-outs, and four runs scored in the innings he pitched. Other than that, he did great. Oh, and they had a bad ump. That's always fun. I am hoping for no work tomorrow so I can catch up on laundry and chores, and spend some time with Rusty in my lap. But if they call, I will take it, because someone told me today there are nine weeks of school left!
But .. it is only Tuesday.
The push for next year is "inclusion". The latest trend in education thinking is that special ed and resource kids will do better if you mainstream them, but give them in-class support in the form of a resource teacher. I have heard that there will be no resource rooms next year, and the resource room teachers will "co-teach" in selected regular ed rooms. I have also heard that the elementary schools will only hire new teachers with dual certifications in special ed. There are so many kids who can't keep up in school today. I don't know if it's No Child Left Behind, vaccines, or just our society, that teaches 'to the test'. These are all reasons that I don't think I would ever go back to school for my degree. I've seen too many do it, and they're all still out there, searching.
At the end of the day, one of the special ed kindergarteners had some sort of medical incident and was sent to the hospital in an ambulance! They said he had a seizure, and he had a low grade fever, but his poor teacher was waiting by the door in tears. She is two days from her last day before maternity leave for her second child, with the first being not even two years old. She has one of the roughest classes in the school, with only ten kids (!), and then this had to happen. So hopefully he will be OK. I like this kid, despite himself. He's quite a character, and very smart, so I'm not sure what his classification is. Maybe he's mildly autistic. When I was in the class last week, he said to me, " I don't want to do math. It's boring." And he's six! (I have to admit, it probably his - he is capable of much more than calculating how many apples go to each child when there are six apples and two children)
So otherwise the day was OK, just a little long and I had one kid that couldn't understand me no matter what. It went like this:
Me: there are 36 inches in a yard. How many inches are there in a yard?
Kid: (looks intently at book): Um. One?
This happened in reading, too:
Me: The main idea of this story is getting energy from the wind and the sun. What is the main idea of the story?
Kid: Um. Windmills?
And that was that. Luckily you have pull-out only for an hour in the morning for reading and for forty minutes for math in the afternoon. And I haven't been in this class a whole lot, so I don't know the kids as well as I do the 4th and 5th grade resource kids - who are - by the way - much farther along.
After that, I spent an hour and a half on the phone with the AT&T customer service people. It seems that the place where I bought my cell phones and have changed the plans over the past, oh - I don't know - 12 years? - has been going into the system and making changes to my plan. I have caught the changes, but no rep has bothered to help figure out how until today. This one looked it up and saw that thay had even entered a false drivers' license expiration date, and changed my plan. They actually screwed everything up, because they changed Megan's line to the main line, and they did away with my texting ability completely, which it took me a few days to realize. I just thought everyone was ignoring me all weekend.
So she corrected everything, gave me a credit for the month's fees for my troubles, and said she would register a complaint against the franchise, which is privately owned. She also made a change so only corporate stores can change my account, or I can do it online. That's just insane. I guess they're compensated for new services sold, like the time they put roadside assistance and voice activated dialing without my permission. Jerks.
And there was my day. Brian is searching for Ralph S. Mouse so I can find out how Ralph does in The Great Mouse Caper, as I have read three chapters to this resource group and am dying to know how it turns out. He doesn't seem to have it. Now he is talking about Mr. Popper's Penguins.
And finally, in other news, Megan has come down with the sniffles. I gave her the last of her prescription decongestant, but this seems to need more than that. She is in good spirits, but she's trying to get out of going to school. She also informed me that her math grade has dropped to a plain A. So she won't be #1 in her class after all. Oh, there go my hopes and dreams. It's because of the week missed for Nationals, she got two 86's on tests. Sigh. Brian's baseball team lost tonight, again, 6-3. He had an error on first, a few strike-outs, and four runs scored in the innings he pitched. Other than that, he did great. Oh, and they had a bad ump. That's always fun. I am hoping for no work tomorrow so I can catch up on laundry and chores, and spend some time with Rusty in my lap. But if they call, I will take it, because someone told me today there are nine weeks of school left!
But .. it is only Tuesday.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Banquet Blues
So today was the annual swim team banquet. It was OK. They gave me flowers, which was quite embarassing because I hate to be singled out in front of large groups of people anyway, and this time I didn't feel like I really deserved it, despite having dedicated probably a weeks' worth of waking hours to getting this book done, with minimal organization. I thrive on lists, and I didn't have one for this job this year.
They also made fun of Megan several times, which at least was funny. That made it entertaining. And with only three seniors who all made very tolerable speeches, that part was most enjoyable.
But tonight is a different story. I have gotten emails from two different people saying that ads that they paid for didn't get into the book. First of all, the book this year had more ads than it has in the past two years, and they're saying it should have been even longer!! I can't find any trail for the first two ads, and the third I find mentioned in an email, then I asked a question about where it was, and I never received a reply. I didn't put any ad into the book until I actually saw a physical hard copy. Second, one of them is asking to refund the business that placed the ad, and I don't even have anything to do with that part of the job. It's been more confusing this year, due to the departure of the man who used to handle the intake of all the ads. I was worried that this might happen, although I did my best to make sure everything was accounted for.
Now I'll just have to wait and see if I can figure out why this would have happened, and if I can prevent it from happening again. It reminds me of my first job, when I placed ads for a classified advertising agency. There were two different functions in the system - csv, which would correct errors in an ad that was already placed, and ad pick-up, which would pick up an old ad and rerun it. Well, I believe what happened was that instead of correcting ads in csv, I changed them all in ad pick-up, so that every ad that had errors in it for every client still ran wrong, but also ran right. I just remember coming in all happy with my new job, and the phone ringing off the hook with customers complaining. My boss was trying to pacify them, and I was the biggest flop to ever hit Madison Avenue (or Lower Fifth, at least). That's the way it is tonight. Not to mention other errors in the book, because other things were told to me incorrectly. So I did everything right, but didn't check my facts, so I may as well have done it wrong. Sob.
And in other news: Kevin is flying off to Denmark as I write this, so I can't even use him as a punching bag. Brian is sniffling and sneezing. Megan lost, but fortunately remembered where, a large sum of cash. But best of all, my new shades and blinds are being installed tomorrow!! They come at 9am. I have two half days of work lined up this week already, and I just ordered two new bathing suits from Lands' End. If only it would feel like it might EVER be bathing suit weather!
They also made fun of Megan several times, which at least was funny. That made it entertaining. And with only three seniors who all made very tolerable speeches, that part was most enjoyable.
But tonight is a different story. I have gotten emails from two different people saying that ads that they paid for didn't get into the book. First of all, the book this year had more ads than it has in the past two years, and they're saying it should have been even longer!! I can't find any trail for the first two ads, and the third I find mentioned in an email, then I asked a question about where it was, and I never received a reply. I didn't put any ad into the book until I actually saw a physical hard copy. Second, one of them is asking to refund the business that placed the ad, and I don't even have anything to do with that part of the job. It's been more confusing this year, due to the departure of the man who used to handle the intake of all the ads. I was worried that this might happen, although I did my best to make sure everything was accounted for.
Now I'll just have to wait and see if I can figure out why this would have happened, and if I can prevent it from happening again. It reminds me of my first job, when I placed ads for a classified advertising agency. There were two different functions in the system - csv, which would correct errors in an ad that was already placed, and ad pick-up, which would pick up an old ad and rerun it. Well, I believe what happened was that instead of correcting ads in csv, I changed them all in ad pick-up, so that every ad that had errors in it for every client still ran wrong, but also ran right. I just remember coming in all happy with my new job, and the phone ringing off the hook with customers complaining. My boss was trying to pacify them, and I was the biggest flop to ever hit Madison Avenue (or Lower Fifth, at least). That's the way it is tonight. Not to mention other errors in the book, because other things were told to me incorrectly. So I did everything right, but didn't check my facts, so I may as well have done it wrong. Sob.
And in other news: Kevin is flying off to Denmark as I write this, so I can't even use him as a punching bag. Brian is sniffling and sneezing. Megan lost, but fortunately remembered where, a large sum of cash. But best of all, my new shades and blinds are being installed tomorrow!! They come at 9am. I have two half days of work lined up this week already, and I just ordered two new bathing suits from Lands' End. If only it would feel like it might EVER be bathing suit weather!
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