Warning, Rant alert!

I typed this entry while on my plan period.  After this, my day got better, thanks to the magic of learning.

I wanted to take this opportunity to vent a few of my frustrations.  Weighing most heavily upon my mind right now is a conversation I had today with another teacher regarding the outcomes of this week’s school board meeting.  The board voted “no confidence” in our superintendent.  Out of eight votes on the board, we only had one person who lived in the city (or ever even really came to this city for any reason), and presumably in outrage, resigned his post this week too.  There have previously been closings of many other local schools, and it seems that ours is the next target of the bureaucratic tape cutters, which means that our school will probably not last long enough for me to fulfill my personal 5-year goal.  This was kind of central to the unfolding of my family plans in this early stage, and now my future in many areas has become uncertain-at best.

This really makes any other concerns seem petty and trifling, but here they are anyway: our students are issued their own laptops, and our district is proud of this 1-to-1 initiative, yet access to the internet is so strictly controlled that I can hardly even depend on the availability of resources that would be helpful, crucial, integral (?) to my technology plans.  Youtube is banned.  Google image search is banned.  Blogs are banned – yet at my special request, edublogs.org has been allowed.  So I was planning on having my seniors give powerpoint presentations on the world religions we are currently studying, and I was hoping to include images as a part of the requirements (because who would honestly enjoy a presentation consisting entirely of text?), yet my request to enable google images was met with the porno defense (you know, kind of like the “they can find anything on there” kind of excuse which could realistically be used to block ANY kind of site, because that is the NATURE of the internet).  I was miffed; and before I sent my rude high-and-mighty email relating my desire to teach accountability to my students and responsible use of the internet, I sought the advice of one of the older teachers, through which I came to the conclusion that this is not a battle that is worth my time and effort, especially since I don’t have tenure at this point.  This was quite the bitter pill, and honestly I am finding it incredibly difficult to bounce back from, which is the point of this ranting blog post.

The third thing that is really bothering me has to do with the way my students speak to each other.  How rude these kids are!  I honestly have no idea where they learned that it is ok to call a girl a “skank” even if “it’s true.”  I mean, we all know the type (of girl), but it is completely inappropriate to use that language even if you are joking, and especially if it is true.  But on the other hand, these girls don’t exactly act like ladies, either, so it feels like I am a very small island in an ocean of … well, you get the point.  I’m feeling quite isolated these days, and since I left last weekend, I have felt totally behind on my work, and that is frustrating.

I finished this little rant with some time to spare, so i looked around KS, CO, and MO for another job, how depressing!  I was feeling a little vulnerable, therefore, going into my 11th grade class, and for a while, it went horribly.  They were extremely chatty, and seemed unwilling to participate in discussion.  “Oh, great!” I thought to myself.  “This was supposed to be the fun, groundbreaking, mind-bending unit, and they were uninterested, apathetic, lost.  After a few minutes in which my internal pressure kept getting higher and higher, I decided “Fine!  Fuck it.”  I told them “Turn to the end, and do ALL the questions for after the reading.”  They took one look at that list of questions and freaked out.  Then I asked, “Do you guys want to talk about this piece now?”  My answer was an emphatic, unanimous YES!  So I begin just reading them the piece.  I read sentences over and over again, emphasizing different words, so as to break up the thoughts into manageable chunks, stopping to paraphrase when the language got a bit lofty.  (I didn’t realize as I read, that this was in fact quite the wordy selection)  But they got it, and better yet, they were excited!  The sparks were flying, and I was really breaking through to them!  It’s kind of hard for me to relate to their ideologies for obvious reasons, but once i got over the idea that they didn’t care too much for our president and started using examples that meant something to them, they really became engaged.  We didn’t get through the whole thing today, and I had planned on moving on to something NEW today, but it’s ok.  I’m just going to slow down, and it’s a good thing anyway, because i have multiple students who have to be gone at least a day per week for sports or field trips or whatever.  It’s incredibly annoying, but I guess them’s the breaks.  I’m slowing down.  My pace isn’t important, it’s the teaching and learning that are important.  And it’s worth slowing down to see them experiencing the same excitement I felt with this piece.  It’s powerful stuff.