Two weeks, four days, and counting.

SO I have a partner teacher. She's very sweet. She's supposed to be in charge of the 6-7 special ed kids I have in my first two classes. However, she's not a math teacher. This means that I have to make extra copies of everything, including keys to worksheets and tests, because she can't do them. I have to grade all the tests because she can't grade the work, only the answers.

Did I tell you she's very sweet?

She's not happy about the arrangement. She is normally a social studies teacher, and was very alarmed when they put her in Algebra. She can't help me teach, because she doesn't know Algebra. She's supposed to be a special education teacher, but she can't help the special ed kids. She wants to do more, but she can't. She feels bad about this. She's retiring next month. Meanwhile, she wants to be useful.

So finally, I asked her to grade some quizzes for me. Multiple-choice ones. Sounds easy, right? I mean, you look, the key says C, so if their answer isn't C, you mark it wrong. Except that I didn't give her the key and she didn't want to bother me, and she doesn't know enough about Algebra to make one. So she decided to try to "help" me more by doing some other stuff, like consolidating my files. Without asking me.

I told you how sweet she is, right?

She showed me the result: very large files labled with each period that had all of their work in it. All of it. She'd taken the papers that were graded and not recorded, turned in but not graded, and recorded but not yet passed back--and put them all in one big file. Mixed them all together. Aieee.

"Um, Eleanor? Um, did you notice that some of the files said, "IN" and some said, "OUT"?

"You mean I mixed all that up? Oh, dear...you must be furious with me!"

Sigh. I decided that I was going to have to fix this myself. What else could I do? I can't let her have access to my electronic gradebook, to see which ones are recorded and which ones aren't. Besides, there's only so many deep, cleansing breaths that a person can take before they go postal and scream out, "Get the eff away from my files!"

Meanwhile, I'm supposed to be writing 5-6 pages of "reflection" on how my year went for my annual evaluation because apparently, now, it's now my job to tell my supervisors how I did. (I have decided that, since it's up to me, I did awesome.) I was going to spend the morning writing my reflection, which is due Thursday morning, but instead, I sorted through the very large snafu.

I'm so glad not to have to do this crap again next year. I'll still have crap, but it will be different crap, and new crap is sometimes interesting. For a while.

Oh, and have I told you how tired I am of gangsters and their posturing and their stupid baggy damned pants and their stupid grafitti and their stupid blue and white everything? Well, I am.

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