This October has been relatively pain-free. There have been two negatives though. The resigning of one colleague and the stress of another have been the only negatives so far this month. My students have been hard at work. They have applied themselves for the most part. This has been a great change and taken away any stress. The main two things I want to address in this blog is the response I had during report cards and parent conferences as well as generic district frustrations.
During the conferences surround report cards, we are required to stay one day from two til six. In the past, this has been frustrating. Few parents showed up and none of the parents I really wanted to see showed up for the conferences. I have not had more than fifteen or sixteen parents show up on a conference night. This time, I had 40, give or take 2 or 3. This was unreal. I could not believe it. Of these parents, almost all of the parents of the kids who usually cause problems showed up. I was able to store many numbers in my phone, create some parent contracts, and re-explain my expectations for the class. Parents responded quite will to this. They were eager to give them their contact information and seemed to genuinely care about their child’s success. I was very encouraged at these results. It was nice to have parents caring for once. I am looking forward to keeping these parents in the loop and bettering my relationship with them as well as their outlook on the school.
My frustrations have been the tedious monotony that ensues from non-communication. I have a meeting with one person and then when I attend another meeting with another person I am told the same exact thing. Our development time is going over the lesson line and lesson plan. We do this ad nausea. It is frustrating. If teachers are still struggling with this, why don’t they DIFFERENTIATE development instead of frustrate the few competent teachers that are in the school. They also must think we are idiots when it comes to technology. Today we were told how to put pictures in a document, how to upload lesson plans, which we have already been doing for a whole nine weeks. This is aggravating. I have papers to grade, parents to meet, sermons to prepare, a wife to spend time with, and blogs to write! I need to have my time used as if it were valuable, not frivolously.
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