Skip to main content

Seriously, Can't You Just Be Nice??

The pictures below are of my bruises from the IVs I got in the emergency room. Just to prove I was really sick.

Now an administrator at my school says that I need to come take the trash from my room to the dumpster "for the kids." I hate it when they pull this manipulative guilt trip. Why not just say "I understand that you're really sick, but it would really help me if you came to throw away all the trash." Why use the "if you loved the kids, you would do this" card?

Administrators around me have a habit of this. A co-worker of mine was out for two weeks because her mother-in-law was dying in the burn unit. The co-worker says that an administrator was really supportive at first, then when said administrator realized she was out for a while, he/she started sending her emails asking her to do model lessons for a new school hiring process. When she said no, he/she apparently retaliated by scheduling her official observation on the day she returned - from a family tragedy - THIRTY MINUTES after she got there. How hard is it to have a little compassion, understand that someone has just been through a very traumatic family death, and give her a couple of days to get herself back together?

Another co-worker was a brand new teacher this year, and got a really really difficult first grade class. At first, the administrators were very supportive - "Oh, any support you need, let me know... blah blah blah..." But the support never really materialized. Out of the three administrators, two of them couldn't control the class either. To my knowledge, no one ever gave her ideas on how to control them, no one did a model lesson, no one got her the kind of support a new teacher needs. She left halfway through the year after being reduced to tears in her classroom many many times.

It's sad how many principals are the same way. When I started in January, 2000, the principal directed me to the room, told me it wasn't my room because I was a roving teacher, that i had to move all of my stuff into a closet and another room that wasn't really mine, and left. She didn't give me any clues as to what I was supposed to teach, where my curriculum materials were, how to get supplies, where I could find my class list, nothing. Apparently we subscribe to the "sink or swim" school of thought.

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