Skip to main content

Communication

Or Lack Thereof.

Report cards are due sometime. I'd tell you when, but I don't know. To quote Lindsay, this is a "no brainer. It should have been on the calendar from the beginning. Duh." I agree. But it wasn't, so we just have to sort of guess that it's been a long time since report cards, so they must be due soonish.

The administrators decided to be "nice" and give us an hour to work on them today so we wouldn't complain about them being due. We still don't know when they're due. This free hour was created from sending the kids home an hour early, just for today. So, on Friday at 2:30 they passed out notes saying that dismissal was at 2:00 one day only, this Monday, Feb 26. The flaw in this plan was that any child who was absent on Friday or whose teacher didn't check their mailbox at 2:30 pm didn't get the note.

Now, getting the note the Friday before would be bad enough. Parents work, have commitments, arrange for others to pick up their children, etc. Now they have to scramble to adjust everything by an hour. However, when they didn't even know their child was getting out an hour early, things become chaotic. Many of the students had to call their parents, and the administrators had the nerve to tell them not to come to the office to call because the parents "should have known." They had to come back and use my cell phone until the battery died, at which point I wrote a note saying that since this child was not here on Friday, she had no way of telling her mom - or knowing herself - that there was early dismissal.

We found out what the purpose of this hour was after it was over. On Friday, the notes said that the kids would be let out early for a teacher workshop. At 2:00 today, on Monday, I was wondering where the teacher workshop was. I didn't have time to wonder too much though, because half of my class was still in my class trying to figure out where to go, what to do, and how to get their parents to come get them. When I finally got them all out of my class - at the normal dismissal time - I went to my mailbox and found a memo saying that this hour was for working on report cards. Wish I had known before instead of after.

Ridiculous.

As I type this, (I'm on my own time now, not the school's time), there is an announcement over the loudspeaker saying that there is a very important memo about report card dates in the office. They're probably due tomorrow. They were probably due yesterday. Oh well! They'll get them when they get them.

Addendum: Report cards are due Wednesday. Fat chance!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Stuffed Animals

There are several much more serious stories I was going to share, but I'm not in the mood to be made sad tonight, so I'll tell you all about the stuffed animals.  This is a post that needs images so someday when I have or borrow a working scanner, I will add the photos. A few years into teaching, I joined Freecyle.  For those of you who don't know Freecycle, it's a group of people in any given community who are on an email list to get rid of their old stuff and get stuff from other people.  It's a fabulous form of recycling. Somebody posted that they had a huge bag of stuffed animals in good condition to give away and I decided to grab it for my class. I thought that some of the kids would like the stuffed animals, but I certainly didn't think they'd all be into them.  Kids grow up really fast in that neighborhood, and when you have six-year olds talking about how they walk to school alone because their parents say they're "grown," and how

A Loss

  (I have been putting off finishing this blog post for months. You'll see why)  Today, I was cleaning a bookshelf and I found the journal from one of my third-grade students, who I call Fred in my book , in 2001. I still had it because he didn't come to the last day of school to get his stuff this year and I guess it got put in a pile and somehow I've kept it with me.  He didn't come to the last day of school, probably because his family was a mess: dad in prison, mom in an abusive relationship, all the kids (understandably) acting out violently. Fred was expelled from our school in second grade for hitting a teacher. Then he was expelled from the other school, I don't know why, at the end of second grade. He came back on the condition from the administration that he be in my class because I had him as a student in first grade and he listened to me and worked well with me.  We had a really good relationship, although Fred was definitely not easy to have in class.

A New Prison, Part Two

  Second very long part of the prison visit report.   After we got all the paperwork filled out and went through the metal detector, we got visitation slips with the name of the inmate, and made our way over to the other building for visitation. This is not maximum security so thankfully you can just sit next to the inmates, and not be separated by glass or have to use a telephone to talk.    First, you get a gate unlocked and go into a holding pen that is of course in direct sunlight (or rain if it's that season) and surrounded by fences topped with razor wire. You wait there until the gate at the other end is unlocked. This holding pen was a little bigger and less claustrophobic than the other prison (I do not have any claustrophobia and I came very close to a panic attack once at the other place) and they opened the other gate more quickly. Then you walk, again in blazing sunlight (or rain) to the visitation building. This one was less of a walk than the other prison but I still