Skip to main content

A Methodical, Miserable Mista

I have a process when it comes to my job. When this process is executed to perfection, life is smooth. I get time to think about how the day went and how the lesson worked. Or how it didn't work. I'm not always perfect. But I like being close.

My lesson PowerPoints are pre-uploaded to my school's e-mail from my Macbook Pro the evening before. The next morning, I arrive to school early and download them onto the Dell piece-of-shit-desktop computer connected to the SMARTBoard. In mere seconds, my lessons are open, ready and waiting to be presented.

Quizzes and homework assignments are pre-downloaded to a USB thumb drive (also the evening before), which I simply plug into the Xerox printer in the main office and print. I always print five additional copies of whatever I need as I have learned from the past that having more copies of material is always a good thing. I don't lose things, but I guess students do. Humans.

All quizzes and homework assignments are graded before I leave for the day, with grades uploaded into a spreadsheet I created that utilizes conditional formatting to colorfully detail how students performed (green = good). My student aides change the date to tomorrow's date on the chalkboard once they're done entering the grades into my spreadsheet. I write the next day's topics on the white-erase board before I leave.

This is pretty efficient when I'm operating at 100% health. I usually am. However, the following things happened today:
  1. I forgot to upload the lessons I had worked on the night before. Luckily, I had my lessons from last year saved on my desktop, but all the lovely tweaks I had made the night before were gone.
  2. I left my USB thumb drive in the printer and walked off with my copies. Luckily, a colleague found the drive and gave it back to me.
  3. I locked myself out of my own room. Twice.
  4. I made a mistake in a math lesson while modeling how to simplify a specific type of problem involving exponents. I actually forgot to use the order of operations in a problem. Luckily, a student pointed out my error. A student who barely comes to class.
I could tell I was getting sick because things were suddenly not falling into place. Yesterday, my throat felt scratchy after lunch. I tried to remedy this with cough drops, orange juice, sleep, and more orange juice.

I guess I'm getting worse, and I feel helpless.

Falling sick always shocks me, as I am rarely sick. I was never absent in high school. The last time I actually missed a school day due to sickness was in the seventh grade: I missed three school days which ultimately led to my first and only "B" in middle school. It was sewing class and never did learn the art of applying my foot gently on the sewing machine pedal. Because of this "B" in middle school, I was salutatorian instead of valedictorian. Because of sewing class. No, because I was sick. No, it was because my sewing teacher was a nut job with no sympathy for hard-working students overcome with illness. Completely crazy.
Says I, the nut job who was never absent in high school and who just wrote an entire post about his control issues. Touche, conscience. Touche.
Labels:

Comments

Mr. and Miss When you are really a teacher, you don't have a last name. said…
Hmmm. Let's have lunch, and you can help to fine tune my own systems? No wonder you are always so calm cool and collected!
October 19, 2011 at 8:45 PM
Yo Mista! said…
@ Miss Em:
It's all a mask.
October 20, 2011 at 8:09 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We Need to Talk About Tenure

The idea and privilege of "tenure" in public education has garnered a lot of attention as of late. Most people who have never worked in education a single day in their lives seem to feel that tenure is unfair and teachers should work under the same expectations that other "regular" and hard-working Americans work under. At least, that's the narrative being presented in the media. Three years ago, I would have agreed, but I didn't know any better. At the college and university level,  tenure  is difficult to obtain and can take 4-8 years. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but from what I think I know, the candidate usually needs to have published some sort of research and have demonstrated a strong teaching record, among other things. Before becoming a high school teacher, I understood why tenure was necessary at the college and university level as it protected academics when they published work that went against the mainstream, and thereby prevented profes...
16 comments
Read more

The Two Brothers

Two years ago, two brothers enrolled at the alternative school where I worked. Colin and Ken, at 16 and 15 years old respectively, had just come back from spending two years in the Dominican Republic. They were now living in a foster home in the Bronx away from their birth parents. During the years they spent in the Dominican Republic, Colin and Ken were in and out of school, but mostly out, working on their family's farm as free labor. Beyond the trauma of separation  from  their birth parents, Colin and Ken experienced a significant amount of trauma  with  their birth parents. They were two teenagers who had already lived a lifetime. Silent with a dark sense of humor, Colin kept quiet during the school day during most of his first year. His entrance test scores placed him in classes at about (or slightly under) grade level. In those classes, Colin excelled. During his first year in this alternative school, Colin accumulated credits, earned rewards based on academ...
2 comments
Read more

Teach for Pakistan

I've been visiting Karachi every other year since I was six months old. My parents were both born there. The bulk of my extended family still lives there. It's strange how my perspective and investment in the country has changed over the years. I hated going to Pakistan when I was younger. My mother dragged me there for two, sometimes three months at a time over the summer. The heat was miserable and the humidity was unbearable. My family wasn't well off, so it's not like I was in a huge mansion of sorts living in the tropics, eating cold mangoes. That would've been nice. The only things I enjoyed were the company of my cousins, the food and the taste of Coca-Cola made from real sugar. Besides that, I really never did anything else. I was pretty quiet: my aunts would compliment me on my lack of communication. Heh. It was not until I was a teenager that I truly began to appreciate my experiences in Pakistan. I started engaging in the family functions, weddings an...
15 comments
Read more