No-vember

See, I knew that November sucked.

This is a chart that my district provided to us “new-to-the-district” teachers at one of our in-service meetings.

You may remember that I posted a similar graph during my student teaching. It charted the highs and lows, emotionally speaking, of the student teaching experience. Looking at it, I wonder if the roller coaster ride isn’t more about teaching in general than specifically student teaching.

It’s November, and I’m firmly in Disillusionmentville. (I’m hoping that I’m ahead of the curve, so to speak, and that I don’t really have five months of this to look forward to.) I don’t really like my classes very much. I’m not crazy about what I’m teaching. My students are making me crankier and crankier. I’m not even enjoying NaNoWriMo.

I was really excited about moving to high school. Not only would there be all of those great high school-y things (sports, band, dances, events, graduation) but I’ve have students at a higher cognitive level with more life experiences – students who would get my jokes and be able to dig deeper into things. Well, the events and whatnot are here, but not worth it. And the higher cognitive level is totally absent. I’m pretty sure that my seventh graders were brighter than the majority of these kids, and certainly more motivated.

This is depressing. I am not enjoying this.

My school doesn’t believe in Honors English. Juniors and seniors have the opportunity for CP and AP classes, or classes tailored to their interests in their academies, but underclassmen are all lumped in together. As a result, I might have 3-4 smart cookies in the class, but they’re totally buried by the kids who are being forced to be here and who hate being in school and who especially hate being forced to learn about writing and literature. I don’t mind the “average” or even the struggling kids – they’re charming and hardworking and surprising. But there are so many totally apathetic kids that it makes it really, really hard.

Some days this feels like drudgework. I look out at the class. I’ve got a great lesson on a subject I care about, and it’s not like we’re doing predicates here, I’m talking about swashbuckling adventure novels and how Shrek uses parody and incongruity to satirize fairy tales and gender roles and how The Princess Bride is a satire and how it and The Princess Diaries are Ruritarian romances. And across the room, I see blank faces, tops of heads, rolling eyes, smirks as kids communicate wordlessly across the room. They don’t care. They don’t care when I read a section of The Princess Bride aloud and bellow about my broken radio at the top of my lungs. They don’t care when I show them the different movies being parodied when Fiona beats up Robin Hood and the Merry Men. They don’t care when I say that their 100-point essay is due next class, because they’re not going to write it anyway.

Is it me? Is it them? Is it just November? Has anyone charted student morale? Is it possible that the students hit a wall in November, and that their apathy and lack of motivation have this big a drain on teacher morale? Or is the low teacher morale leaking out and affecting student enthusiasm?

Or is it just teaching?

Look at that chart again. Here, I’ll even re-paste it so you don’t have to scroll up.

When I was counting the months of “disillusionment” I realized that they stretched from November through May. That’s practically the entire school year. According to this chart, teachers spend the first quarter barely getting by, the fourth quarter reflecting on everything that went wrong (and hopefully, how to improve it) and everything else during the school year is just dreadful. The only high point on the chart is during the summer months.

That’s not what I think teaching is like. Not really. The best part of being a teacher is not June, July, and August. I love teaching.

Don’t I?

Exactly which part of that chart isn’t accurate, Mrs. Bees?

Well, hopefully the part where the bottom of the curve lasts for two entire quarters…

I don’t want to mislead anyone. I’m in no danger of burning out on teaching – this is, still, the best job I’ve ever had, and I love it. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that, as of right now, I’m not sure that high school is the best fit for me. I miss my short, sincere, silly little twelve-year-olds. They can’t grasp metaphor, they can’t remember deodorant, and they can’t shoot hoops, but they at least act like they like me.

Awful

My junior class makes me miss my seventh graders so much.

Probably I handled this entirely wrongly. I’m not sure I care.

Remember Noisy Boy? Well, he’s going to need a real name, I think, because I suspect we’re going to get to talk about him a lot. I’m told that there’s a softer side to him, so for now, let’s call him Hyde – maybe eventually I’ll meet Jekyll.

Hyde has issues. Let’s not forget that. Hypothetically, his behavior is not his fault. He’s supposed to have severe ADHD. He’s adopted, and I don’t know what the story is behind that. If I had to guess, based on his behavior, I’d say there’s some trauma there – some sort of “my parents didn’t want me, so who the hell cares who I am or how I act” feeling.

He’s angry, and he’s irritated, and he’s bored, and he could give a damn.

Yesterday we were reading Act II of “The Crucible.” A couple of talented student readers were reading the main roles, and doing a great job at it. It was interesting, understandable, and even – as junior English goes – enjoyable. Most of the kids were into it. Hyde, however, was refusing to look at a book, rocking his chair to the point where it almost fell over several times, and disrupting his cousin. I quietly told him to put his chair down and read along; he physically resisted me.

Later, he put his head down and went to sleep. I might would have ignored it – probably every teacher occasionally makes the decision that a sleeping kid is better than a disruptive one – but he was showing so much underwear that I couldn’t let it go. Without interrupting the reading, I woke him and told him he needed to pull up his pants. He told me (loudly) that there was nothing wrong with his pants, and put his head back down. At that point, I recognized that continuing the conversation would definitely disrupt class, so I waited.

After the reading was done, he immediately came to life and began bugging another student, taking her things and rooting through her bag. I pulled him aside and tried to talk to him about his attitude. He threw himself onto a desk, began twisting back and forth, rolling his eyes and making faces at me. He told me that the reading was boring and stupid, that he didn’t know or care what was going on, and that my entire class was boring and stupid.

I asked him what his goals were, what he wanted. He told me that I wasn’t allowed to talk to him, that he didn’t have to answer any of my questions. I told him that he should, because I was trying to respect him and talk to him like an adult. I asked the question again. He began saying “I dunno” over and over and over again, like a six year old having a tantrum. I finally told him that I was going to have to write him up if he couldn’t behave any better than this, and he told me that I didn’t have the right to write him up for not answering a question. I walked away and called security.

While waiting for security to show up, I tried to wrangle my class back under control. They’d had ten minutes to begin working on the assignment, and had taken that ten minutes to pack up, walk around the room, move desks around, and throw all the cushions off of the sofa. I stood in front of the door and told them that no one was leaving until I saw people in their desks working on the classwork.

The bell rang, and – knowing I meant business – the class remained seated. I said that anyone who had 5 or more of the questions answered could show me their work and go; two students did. Challenging Boy (Hyde’s cousin) tried to sneak past me and was sent back to his seat. As the halls filled, I let those with 4 questions done go, then 3 questions. Several kids, figuring I’d eventually let everyone go, just sat there. I stopped before the 2 question release and told them that no one was allowed to go without showing me at least one completed question. Backpacks flew open.

Hyde tried to storm out of the room. I blocked the door and told him he had to show me one answer. A few kids came by with an answered question and I let them go. Hyde came up with a one-word, incorrect answer scrawled on a sheet of paper. I told him it was wrong, and asked if he could tell me what the question was. (He hadn’t even opened the book.) He went over to his cousin’s desk and began loudly commenting on the stupidity of it all. Most of the class correctly answered the first question and was released. My next class was waiting in the hall to enter.

Meanwhile, security still hadn’t shown up.

Hyde went over to my printer and jerked out a sheet of paper. (I realized later that he nearly broke the paper tray in the process.) A moment later he came up to the door with an incomprehensible scrawl, covering the entire page in one-inch-high letters. I looked at him. “Hyde, I’m not accepting this. You’re a young adult and you can’t turn in work that looks like this. You need to do this correctly.”

At this point he began yelling at me.

“YOU’RE PISSING ME OFF,” he yelled.

“You’re not exactly making me very happy, either,” I responded.

“Well, that’s just great. You want a cookie?” he snarled. “What’s the big deal? I’m just going to throw it away the minute I leave this stupid room anyway.”

He crumpled up the sheet of paper, threw it across the room, and stomped back to my desk. He took another sheet of paper out of the printer, sat down, and rewrote his answer, this time making some approximation at correct assignment format. He shoved it under my face, and I took a moment to read it. It was close enough.

“I’ll accept that,” I said, “but for now, you need to take a seat.”

“Well that’s just great. I’m having fun now,” he said.

He threw himself into a seat. I ignored him and called security again. There’d been a miscommunication; they thought he just needed to go to the bathroom. (He’s on a hall freeze list.) Then they got confused when I said he was still in my room. They tried to tell me just to send him down the hall and they’d meet him; I refused, knowing he’d never show up.

Finally a security guard arrived, with apologies about the confusion. I explained the situation and handed him the hastily written referral slip that I’d been working on, off and on, for the past fifteen minutes. Hyde saw the guard and stood up, throwing his crumpled-up assignment across the room as he went. My classroom full of sophomores tried not to stare.

God, a third period like that makes me appreciate my fourth period so much. I wanted to cry, but they were smiling and joking, and I just smiled at them and was so happy that I had some nice kids to balance out the deeply troubled (and troubling) ones. They began writing spooky stories for our end-of-October formal writing assignment, and I played “Monster Mash” and “Thriller” and “I Put a Spell on You.”

I don’t know what to do with Hyde. I really don’t.

The Nice Thing About Teaching…

…is that, for 7.5 hours a day, you can feel in control of your own life.

Protected: Sweet(er) Dreams (?)

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Inspired by Fiction?

One of my seventh grade boys (who gets to be called Colt here, because I keep mentally describing him as “coltish”) has landed himself in deep poo.

He’s a nice boy with some problems. Unmedicated ADHD. Too smart for his own good, which leads to boredom in the classroom. Wants to be tough. Has (unfortunately for his wannabe toughness) auburn curls.

During first period, VP-7 came into my room and took Colt away. I didn’t think too much of it; Colt is one of those boys who gets pulled out of class. Later, it turns out that Colt never went back to any of his classes that day. Curious, his other teachers and I went to VP-7’s office for information.

Two days later, we finally got most of the story out of the administration (who were constrained by the ongoing investigation and privacy).

Colt brought a knife to school – bad enough, considering we have a zero-tolerance policy. That’s expulsion right there under most circumstances. Worse, he pulled it on a younger kid and pretended (or “pretended” – how would we know?) to threaten him. The kid reported Colt, and the rest was pretty clear-cut.

What bothers me is that I kind of think I know what Colt was thinking (inasmuch as a thirteen-year-old boy is ever thinking anything). See, we’re reading The Outsiders. He’s not in my reading class, but he would come in to my writing class and, given five minutes of spare time, grab one of my classroom copies and start reading it voraciously. If you don’t remember how the book goes, the relevant information is that it is full of tough, quasi-heroic young boys who carry switchblades.

Smart, bored boy gets hooked on a book filled with characters he’d love to resemble. He can’t teleport himself back to the 1960s, but he can walk with a swagger and a knife in his pocket.

Assuming it’s even the case, what’s the lesson? Don’t teach this book? I have to admit, I had my doubts about its appropriateness, but for the first time all year I think the kids are actually loving a book. What teacher in their right mind would take that away?

Meanwhile, Colt is suspended, almost certainly expelled, and quite possibly up on juvenile criminal charges. It’s a heart-breaker. We’d been trying really hard to help this kid… but I guess sometimes there’s no holding them back from the brink.

Ruining My Spring Semester

I am doing a better job at teaching than I am at blogging about it. (Although to be fair, I’ve got some notes and drafts stowed away. Probably ought to finish them and get them posted, huh.)

I love what I’m doing. Some days are hard, and some weeks – like this one – exhaust me with the sheer emotional load of caring about and for these children. I’m told that I’m doing well. I feel like I’m doing a good job. I’m feeling more comfortable, more at home, here at LMS. I’m settling in.

Too bad it seems to all be falling apart around me.

I’m what they call a Category 1 teacher, which means that I was hired at the very last minute. Technically, I suppose, I was a desperation hire. The enrollment numbers turned out higher than was anticipated just before school started, and I lucked into a position. I would have put my whole heart into my teaching anyway – why do something less than 110%? – but this was extra incentive. I had to do a good job if I wanted to keep my job next fall. See, Category 1 teachers are on a non-renewing one-year contract. I knew from the outset that I was going to be gently terminated at the end of the school year and, if all had gone well, rehired for the following year. This, of course, was also contingent on there being appropriate enrollment numbers. Unfortunately, it could take until the last minute (again) to find out about those numbers. That creates a very real possibility that I’d be Category 1 again: no tuition reimbursement, and no job security.

None of this seemed too worrisome in the fall. I reckoned it would all work out in the end.

But now the economy has fallen apart. They’re talking about laying off teachers, among many other things.

Apparently, and according to a friend and a contract expert, this is the scenario I’m facing:

At the end of the school year, I’m done. I will pack up and empty out my classroom. I am going to be paid through August, because it was a one-year contract, but I am in the same place I was before I ever got the job. I am not an employee of the school district. I’ve gained one important thing, in that the school knows me and (allegedly) wants me back. That’s a very important foot in the door.

The schools have to wait for the state, and the state has to wait for the feds. Once everyone gets their ducks in a row, they’ll know how many teachers they need for next year. If last year is any indication, this will be late in the summer.

Soooo… all summer, again, I’m going to be worrying about whether or not I’m going to have a job. I’m going to have to print out resumes again, get my application into the aggravating HR pool again, interview again. I could be back at LMS in my same classroom, or I could be in a high school on the other side of the district, or I could be sitting on my couch at home. If they are even hiring at all, it’ll probably be late, and I’ll probably end up Cat 1 again – which means we’ll do this again.

It isn’t supposed to be like this. Once you get hired, you’re supposed to be able to teach if you want to and if you aren’t awful. You’re supposed to get a job, work hard, get tenure three years later, and be able to breathe. You’re not supposed to fall in love with a school and the people in it just in time to get kicked back to the curb.

I’ve been assured by several coworkers that our admins are going to fight to keep me, but I know as well as anyone that these things are rarely within anyone’s control.

Worse, I know how miserable Mr. Bees is. He has graduated. His diploma (three emphases, a minor, and certification to teach two different subjects) is sitting on the mantle. He wants to be in a classroom so much, but if it was going to be hard for him to get a job as a social studies teacher before, it’s going to be nigh unto impossible now. When they’re cutting loose existing teachers, they aren’t hiring untested ones.

I figured I’d teach a year, get tenure within reach, and then consider that whole “baby” thing I’ve heard so much about. (Don’t get me started – I want to start a family so bad that my teeth hurt when I think about it.) Now I don’t know what to do.

I don’t want to lose this job. But I guess, in a manner of speaking, I already have.

Unpleasantly Small World

A second school campus in Arkansas – this time, the University of Central Arkansas – was shot up last night. Two young men were killed, and another was shot in the leg.

One of Mr. Bee’s students recently moved to our area from Arkansas. (Not to be too specific, but Mr. Bee’s school is approximately 1,700 miles from the University of Central Arkansas campus.) Last night, the student – we’ll call him Art, Art from Arkansas – decided to call up one of his buddies back home. He was on the phone with his friend at the moment when he was shot in the leg.

From what I hear, Art heard a loud noise and then the phone hit the ground. A moment or two later, someone else picked up the phone and shouted, “He’ll call you back later,” before hanging up. Apparently, the friend had immediately blacked out from the pain. Meanwhile, Art had no idea what was going on. He learned later that there had been a shooting, but it wasn’t until he was in the school library this morning that he heard his friend’s name on the news. Fortunately, he was able to get hold of his friend’s parents and find out that he was going to be okay.

Uhm.

I think that I have several stories to share – and, lacking stories, I could definitely take some time and space to ramble about my life as a teacher. I’ve hit a bit of a low spot in my biorhythm or something, and seem to have plenty that I could find to complain about. (Un)fortunately for you (depending on what you want to read, I guess) I just can’t bring myself to write about any of it. There’s nothing real, just the whole “new job” thing, I think.

New jobs kind of suck. It’s hard to find your place in everything.

I need to chisel myself out a spot. I need some psychological leverage. I’m not having fun, and that’s no good for anyone. Pretty soon I’ll be wanting to hide, and since I’m She Who Organizes Pep Rallies and Runs Student Council, that’s not going to fly.

Also! Who the heck is FICA, and why does she have half my paycheck?

Okay, I need to go write a quiz now.

Plagiarizing is Bad Enough When There’s a Point

Lucy is one of those students that you just like to teach. She’s got a happy personality, a good attitude, and a strong work ethic. Lucy sits up front, always has a smile, and is a good sport when you pick on her for being a ditz. The fact that she has managed to get through junior high with a fourth-grade (at best) understanding of grammar is easily forgiven when you are sitting next to her, trying to calm her down as she bawls about her terror of failing English 9 again. It isn’t that she isn’t trying – she tries her little butt off. (Case in point: she asked for extra help with grammar, and after we spoke for a while we determined that what helped Lucy most was practice. I gave her a metric ton of grammar activities: worksheets, paper games, supplementary reading, you name it. She came in the next day with half of it done, and had the rest done the following day.)

Lucy is a musician and a songwriter, and although her grammar is spotty she has a nice way with words. When she came up to me, blushing, with a poem she had written for her best friend, I praised it with sincerity. It wasn’t a work of genius, but it wouldn’t  have seemed out of place on  a Hallmark greeting card.

The next day, Lucy brought me another poem, and then another. She brought me a poem she had written for her brother, and it was remarkably good. It was so good, in fact, that I asked if she might consider writing a “companion poem” – this one about girls instead of boys. She enthusiastically agreed that this would be a nice idea, and two days later brought me a matching poem more appropriate for a sister. I praised this poem as well and, while she was busy doing something else, typed a copy of it into my email to keep as a student sample. When I was done, I asked if I could borrow the boy poem to do the same.

As Lucy rummaged through her folder, she spoke to me: “My mom even helped me put it on the computer! I wanted to put it online, so she helped me put it online. I have it on my MySpace, too. But I don’t like to put my name online, so I put it under ‘Author Unknown’.”

If you’re an educator or a parent (or any other experienced judge of character) you are already wincing, but let me tell you – Lucy could have been reciting the Gettysburg Address and I still would have known she was being dishonest. She had that tone of voice, that cadence, that screams I know I may be caught, I’m covering for myself on the fly, quick, let’s throw off the dumb teacher by preemptively explaining the discrepancy. (In retrospect, the fact that she jumped immediately to this point probably indicates that she has plagiarized, and been caught, in the past.)

Anyway, my heart sank. I said nothing but took the proffered poem to my desk and, instead of opening up my email, went to Google. It didn’t take long to find the poem online – not just on MySpace or some cheesy free website Lucy’s mom might have set up, but everywhere. Mr. Bees and I did a little bit of digging later and discovered the poem copyrighted as early as 1999, when Lucy would have been a kindergartner. By 2000, both poems were being sold on cross-stitch kits online. Lucy hadn’t bothered to change so much as a phrase, although in her copying she had misspelled several words.

Why in the world would Lucy do such a thing? It’s one thing – deplorable, but understandable – when a student plagiarizes for an assignment. But Lucy was plagiarizing something for no reason – something that she had written for herself. Or, as the case may be, had written to impress me. And I was impressed, all right – impressed that Lucy, of all people, would be the person I would catch lying to me.

I discovered Lucy’s transgression after school on Friday, and it haunted me all weekend. The poems weren’t an assignment, so there was no real academic action to be taken. On the other hand, next year Lucy will be in tenth grade (the year with the huge poetry unit, worth a sizeable chunk of their grade) at a local parochial school with an exceptionally strict morality policy. If Lucy pulls something like this again, it will have a permanent and devastating effect on her transcript, and possibly her future.

My mind had been mostly made up on Friday evening, but on Monday I was sure I knew what I had to do. After school I asked Lucy to meet with me. We went into a neighboring teacher’s classroom, because this is a litigious society and it never hurts to have a witness. She knew something was wrong, but she didn’t know what.

“I want to talk to you about poetry,” I said. She tensed, but kept the same happy look on her face. I went on:

I was really impressed by what you were doing with your poems – so impressed,  in fact, that I wanted to keep a copy for myself – a sample of student work. When I asked to see the boy poem, though… well, Lucy, most teachers get pretty good at reading people, and at detecting it when someone isn’t being completely honest. And when you told me about putting the poem online, you were giving off all of the signals that you were not telling me the full truth.

She tried to protest; I continued.

I went online, Lucy, and I think you know what I found. That poem is online everywhere. I found it in Boy Scout newsletters dating back to 1999, and I think we both know you were too young to have written that poem in 1999. The girl poem is online, too, and it is just as old. They were selling these poems on cross-stitch kits eight years ago.

The denials – and the waterworks – began. I asked her to let me finish.

I understand that you are saying that you didn’t plagiarize these poems,  but that doesn’t change the fact that it is, unfortunately, simply not your work. You can see the 1999 newsletter right here.

She looked at the date, flipped through it, found “her” poem, threw the newsletter back onto her desk. All the time she is crying that she doesn’t understand, that she didn’t do it, that her cousin helped her write it (oh, really?), that her mom really did help her put it on the internet, that she has written lots of poems…

Lucy, I don’t doubt that you write poems. I don’t doubt that you are a beautiful writer. I am not even going to say that you did this on purpose, because sometimes people plagiarize on accident. We memorize something and don’t know it, for example. Or maybe your cousin plagiarized it and you didn’t realize.

Lucy was really fighting the tears, and frankly I’m surprised that she held onto them this well. She’s a big weeper, and this is a Big Upset.

Now Lucy, you’re not in trouble. This isn’t an assignment. In fact, I spent a long time trying to decide if I wanted to say anything to you or not, because I knew how much it would upset you. In the end, though, I had to say something because I care very much about you and don’t want anything bad to happen to you. I need to you listen to me for a few minutes, okay?

I had to repeat that last sentence about a dozen times in order to stem her flow of denials and protests.

Next year you are going to be in tenth grade, and things are different in high school than they are in junior high. You are going to be doing a major poetry project, if Parochial High School’s curriculum is anything like Urban School District’s, and part of that is going to be writing your own poetry. Teachers are very good at spotting plagiarism, Lucy. The only reason I didn’t catch this immediately is because I have had you for only three weeks and haven’t had much of a chance to learn your writing style yet. But anything that you can find online, a teacher will find online. And when you are in high school – especially one with such a strict moral code – they won’t just sit you down like I am and tell you that you screwed up. At the best, your parents will be called. The VP or principal will get involved. You will get a zero on the assignment – and we’re talking about an assignment big enough to fail you for a semester. You will probably get a detention. You will get a permanent mark on your record, which can have a serious impact on your ability to get accepted to certain schools after you graduate. This will be a very big deal, a very bad deal. I do not want to see that happen to you, Lucy, and that is why I am talking to you now.

The tears were flowing in earnest now, and Lucy was still in frantic denial mode. I repeated my insincere assurance that I believed it was possible that she was innocent of intentional wrongdoing, and added my sincere assurance that I wasn’t mad at her and that this didn’t change my opinion of her.

Regardless of whether you did this intentionally or not, Lucy, the important thing is that you never do it again. And frankly, you know if something you write is your own work, or if it is something you heard before. You need to be more careful. This is a serious issue.

Lucy wondered how she could tell if something she wrote was her own or not. I suggested she give Google a shot, reiterating that anything she could find on Google by typing in “poetry” could be found more easily by typing in a specific line from a poem. I know I’m giving her the main tool that teachers use to catch plagiarists, and I know that a determined adolescent liar will use that information to find a way around getting caught – but I still feel like Lucy is a good kid. At the very least, she is now a guilt-ridden kid who knows that she can get caught. And there is a part of me – a naive new-teacher part of me – that very much wants to believe that Lucy did not deliberately copy the poem. I want to believe that the girl who can’t remember what a verb is from one day to the next somehow memorized two longish poems, word-for-word, and rewrote them without ever realizing that her inspiration was external. So I’m giving her something resembling the benefit of the doubt, and hoping that my warning is heeded.

It won’t be.

And, because fate is the way fate is, she will probably get away with it. That will lead to a bigger cheat, which will start her down a road of unpunished minor ethical violations, until she eats away her own character and good reputation and finds herself an entirely different person than the blithe, good-intentioned little child I have come to know. That’s the cynical, old-teacher part of me talking, and I suspect that she has a pretty good idea of how these things work.

Furious. >:(

It occurred to me that it was the second week of June – not that extraordinary an occurrence, except that I was supposed to have heard back from Suburban School District the third week of May about my screening interview. And I never did.

Meanwhile, all of the Suburban School District jobs are drying up.

So I spent half my lunch break today on the phone with their HR department. (The other half I spent playing IT professional for our slapdash English department here at the summer school – I had wanted to call the jr. high principal back and thank her, but didn’t have time.)

I told the HR gal – the same one I complained about earlier – that I was supposed to have heard from them almost a month ago and had not. She looked through her files and…. anyone wanna guess what she said?

“We don’t have anything from you on file.”

“Uhm,” I replied, “when I called before – in May – I was concerned that my materials had been lost in the mail, so I had you look for them. At that time you told me that you had them in front of you.”

HR Lady made a noise like she thought I was hallucinating and shuffled some papers. She asked what I was endorsed in, asked for my name again. Then: “Oh, are you [Mrs. Bees]? I have your materials here. They haven’t been processed yet.”

Steam proceeds to build behind my ears.

“Yeah, it looks like I just reviewed them… yesterday… We haven’t processed it into a folder yet….”

I held myself in check. “I was told they would have been reviewed and processed three weeks ago.”

“Ha ha, yeah, that was probably wishful thinking on my part if I told you that they would be evaluated in a week.”

I responded with what I hoped would translate over the phone as a very pointed silence. Pretty damn poor time estimation, if you ask me. Thinking something will take a week when it will really take four?

“This time of year, you know…” she continued.

I’m thinking to myself, I applied to Urban School District at the exact same time, and have already been screened and narrowly rejected for an actual job. And you haven’t even put my application in a FOLDER yet??

She went on. “Well, I’ll go ahead and… I guess I can go ahead and schedule you for the screening interview now though. Can you…. can you come in Monday?”

“Well, I’m teaching summer school,” I replied. “I’m teaching from 8-4. In [Urban Area].”

“Oh well, we don’t have any afternoon interviews at all.”

My blood boiling, I asked if they had lunchtime interviews. She said they did and that the interview lasted 30 minutes, and that their latest interview was at 11:30. I looked at the bell schedule; I have lunch from 11:45-12:15, and the Suburban District office is about a 30-minute drive from summer school. I would need to miss an hour of teaching. If we have to miss, we have to find our own substitute; I have no idea how they get paid or anything, and we don’t have a contact list. We just have to “know” someone who is on file with the district who can handle a summer school session. Mr. Bees has offered to sub for me but isn’t available until the afternoon.

How am I even supposed to arrange for a sub that I magically find in the next three hours so that I can call her back and schedule an interview that was supposed to happen a month ago?

I am RAGING pissed, not to put too fine a point on it. This is just inexcusable – what kind of professional practices are these? It’s pretty clear to me, from the tone of HR Lady’s voice and the responses I’m getting, that this isn’t a case of being overwhelmed. It’s a case of not doing her job. There is no earthly reason that my application should not even be in a folder yet. There is no earthly way that they have THAT many applications. This is NOT a major metropolitan area, nor is it an area to which many educators are trying to move.

And it’s not like I can complain, because to whom does one complain about HR? And if I complain, or even indicate that I’m displeased, I’ll never get a job there. Of course, maybe that would be for the best! If this were a corporate environment there would be heads rolling.