“Oh, you sure?”
“Well, it depends. We’ll see how many are here, and how many of the computers are broken.”
“That’s alright, I’ll go.”
I log off my machine, gather my things, and head toward the door. So far, only one of Teresa’s students has arrived.
“Really, you can stay.”
“Yeah? OK. Thanks.”
I sit down and log back on, returning to my email-reading, or IEP-writing, or discus-video-watching (it’s hard for me to concentrate on any one thing for too long, or remember anything, because I’m getting so little sleep lately. You see, I’m participating in this daily writing challenge, and it’s super-fun, but wicked-exhausting…Wait…What was I saying? Where am I? Why am I inside these parentheses?).
Teresa’s remaining students arrive. This is a functions and statistics class, the thought of which makes my head hurt. I took a statistics class in grad school. My final paper was on inductive vs. deductive reasoning. The only paper I’ve ever written where I honestly had no idea what I was talking about the entire time, even when I finished.
Teresa has given her students the directions for today’s activity. I have to commend her: she is assigning her math students a research paper. She figures they can’t just know how to gather and calculate statistics; they also need the ability to analyze and write about them. Impressive. Also impressive is the fact that she divulges to one of her struggling students that she herself never passed the English Regents. Math made sense to her, but reading and writing had always been a struggle, still are, but she worked and worked and she managed to get through college. Even giving this assignment is a challenge for her, but she is willing to make the effort. The point of this revelation is to encourage her student to work hard, so she can overcome her math difficulties.
However, Teresa takes most of the period to tell this story, preventing her student from doing any work. Her story also leaves me completely distracted (did I mention the exhaustion?), so it takes me nearly half an hour to write one email. Finally, with about seven minutes to go, I’m able to close my email and watch some discus videos to get ready for today's practice. Of course, I might as well turn the sound off, because I can’t hear it over Teresa’s yacking.
My productivity was similarly interrupted earlier in the day by my colleagues Lauren and Lisa. No students, but they would. Not. Stop. Talking. Lauren was out sick, and she’s livid that many of her seniors cut class for the substitute. She was teaching a lesson on gerunds and parallelism, and every example sentence was about students cutting. "You're pretty salty about this, aren't you?" asked one of her students.
Lisa has been pureeing all of her husband’s meals, and he’s drinking them through a straw, because he recently busted up his face in a fire-department hockey game. She showed me pictures. I think that was also a one-email period.
Then later I thought I could get something done on hall duty, but a student dropped by for extra help on her Greek god creative writing piece which was due a week-and-a-half ago. Why is she just coming for help now?! Half the period gone.
Somewhere out there, someone has a job that is quiet and peaceful. People leave him alone, and he can accomplish his tasks.
But I wonder where he gets his stories.