Darth Vader Strikes Again

Before I go on any further, I feel obligated to report the bittersweet news that Chrono has been returned to the wild. He was getting more and more lethargic inside, and we finally decided that he was not, in fact, someone's escaped pet, but was instead a wild turtle that escaped from the park across the street and made his way into the street. We took him outside and he immediately perked up....as soon as we let him go in the park, he dug himself under some leaves and started to look like a root of a tree. We miss him, but feel a lot better about not keeping him unhappy in captivity.

I have very little to report about the absurdity of the students this year. They have been really fantastic, still, and are really rising to the occasion with our new location and new principal. I've only had two incidents with students in class - one wouldn't take off her jacket and walked out of class instead, and the other was on his cell phone during advisory and tried to convince me that it was a time when he should be allowed to talk on the phone. That one really irritated me...I called his house that night and his mother said that she was the one who called him so it was okay that he was on the phone. Parents like that totally tick me off...who cares about school rules? It's all about parents' convenience. I wish there was a way to eliminate cell phone service in school buildings.

No, my only issues have been with other teachers. All of them have to do with the advisory period. First, one of the other science teachers was having issues with her advisory class - they were acting really terrible and she couldn't control them. My principal asked me to go down and help her during that time. I left my own students unsupervised during advisory and went down to her room to help her wrangle freshmen....only to find out that she teaches 11th graders that period, and several of them are my own from last year who were fantastic. A couple of days in there supporting her and the cause of her problems became glaringly obvious - she doesn't enforce any rules, so the students do not follow them. She allows them to listen to their headphones, allows them to talk on their cell phones, allows them to change out of their uniforms...she doesn't make the students follow any of the other school rules, so why would they follow the school rules during Advisory? I finally gave up trying to help her, because she was just shooting herself repeatedly in the foot (saying things like "none of us like this, guys, let's just keep from getting the whistle blown on us.") and making me more frustrated. I sent Keisha instead, the crazy mean Bio teacher whose class is next to mine, and she fussed out a few kids and also took one of her own students down there to make them feel guilty. Believe me, if Darnetta Holt told me that MY class was crazy and needed to settle down, I'd feel REALLY bad. I don't know what advisory looks like down there now, but I do know that I love my own advisory.

My love of advisory was the second reason why I got frustrated and threw a fit. Apparently, advisory causes some teachers (I mean about 7, and I'm one of them) to be breaking their contracts. Our old union horses in the building threw a fit and filed a grievance, so now our administration has come to us and asked if we'd rather break contract or change all of the students' schedules to eliminate advisory. They left us alone to discuss the issue, but there was no discussion - Darth Vader and her little sidekick said that the union would force the schedule change whether we wanted it or not. Apparently unions are no longer in place to support the best interests of all their members but to exercise their power over administrators and teachers on behalf of the older generation, and we are no longer afforded the right to be out of compliance with our contract by choice. Well, I'm doing my best to go behind their backs and have everyone whose schedules are out of compliance sign off saying that's ok and subvert the union from within. Wish me luck - or I might have to throw down with Darth.

The other point of interest this year is that I have apparently become some sort of superstar teacher. However, I am not half as good as I have been made out to be. Anyone who has read the 3rd Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants book can relate to this...I keep getting caught doing good things that are not really the norm for me. It's like my principal thinks I'm the Good Ms. McCants, but she never sees Slacker Ms. McCants or Bitchy Ms. McCants. Let me give you some examples. On Friday of last week, I had no lesson plan and no desire to try to teach, so I decided to show CSI (my old throw-back). In the past, an episode of CSI has taken up a whole class period so I haven't had to do anything else along with it. This year, I teach 90 minutes, so I prepared a little "Scientific Method" powerpoint to watch in advance and made my kids fill out a viewing guide about it while they watched the show. Of course, this was the day that the principal chose to observe me. I felt like I was totally busted. However, the next day, I got "kudos" in the daily bulletin for "finding such an engaging way to teach the scientific method." I seriously cracked up. The second ridiculous example happened this week. I just finished calling the parents of all my students to make sure the phone numbers work and establish contact with them. Well, one of those parents that I called works in the system, and she sent me a note and a gift through inter-office mail. The general gist of the message was "thank you for being a good teacher and keeping us updated; let us know if there is anything we can do to help with our daughter." Well, she also CCed the principal on this note. To Phoenicia's (the student) and my absolute mortification, she READ THE NOTE OVER THE INTERCOM in the morning. It was terrible and ridiculous. Pretty soon I'm going to be nominated for teacher of the year.

In other crazy Baltimore news, we had an interesting/scary experience on our way to eat dinner with Sara and Brian at the Rusty Scupper last night. We were on St. Paul at Lexington where St. Paul comes back together from the split (for those of you who are not in Baltimore, this is downtown, and is sort of a weird intersection) right across from Mercy. This woman walked out into the street, apparently unaware that she was heading toward oncoming traffic. Fortunately for her, she was moving slowly enough that the light changed before she got to the part of the street where cars were coming. She stumbled several times, teetered in either direction, then stopped and put her hands on the ground to stabilize herself. She stood up, took a few more steps, and did it again. This time, she sat down, and then slowly eased herself onto the ground until she was laying flat on her back in the middle of the intersection. By now, we had passed her and pulled over and I was on the phone with 911 requesting an ambulance while Matt was going to check on her. A woman was smart enough to pull her car sideways and block the intersection so no one could run her over. Sara and Brian stayed with the car while Matt and I waited for the ambulance. While we were waiting, some little 18 year old girl crossing the street with her friend started yelling "Stop gawking and drive! Mind your own business! Why isn't that woman in a hospital anyway!" Matt and I and the little bicycle dude who had stopped agreed that you ought to know what is going on before you start running your mouth. Anyway, once the ambulance, fire truck, and police car got there, they rubbed her chest and tried to wake her up, but she didn't wake up. Finally, when they were just about to lift her on to the stretcher, she suddenly bolted awake and leapt up off the pavement. It was weird. Matt and I both gave police statements...at first they all were convinced she'd been hit by a car, and it was tough to get the message across that there was no car and that she'd gotten herself onto the ground and laying flat on her back. Eventually they figured it out, though. Oh....Baltimore........

And now, because this post is a little dry otherwise, here are some funny pictures of Matt and Brian riding the Zipper at the State Fair a few weeks ago...:-)