Rules

I'm a rule-follower. I like rules because I know that if I follow them, everything will turn out exactly the way it's supposed to turn out. I view life very rationally. If I follow the rules, then nothing unexpected or negative will happen. Following rules keeps me from experiencing mistakes, which can be both negative and positive. But it also lets me be completely free within those rules.



The rules I like to follow are not always hard and fast, written rules like speed limits, laws, or job requirements. They include laws of nature, implicit, unstated rules and proven facts. For example, I know for a fact that a zoo would not let the public touch an animal that will harm it. So when I go to a zoo and there is an area where people are allowed to pet a stingray, I have absolutely no fear in petting one. Why would I? Rationally, there is no way a zoo will let people touch an animal that has even a small chance of hurting a person because of our highly litigious society. Companies and corporations would much rather be safe than sorry, which is why the zero-tolerance rule in schools was instituted. I am extremely rational so I know that a stingray in a petting area of the zoo will not hurt me. The same goes for other animals that I may know enough about to understand that they won't hurt me.



A lizard got in my car the other day. I happen to like little reptiles and amphibians, so better it happen to me than many other people. It actually got in my car because I was trying to be nice and save it from a certain death (it was on the hood of my car so I stopped to help it down when it scurried into my open door). Once again, because I am super rational, I knew that the lizard couldn't hurt me. I wasn't a big fan of the possibility that it might run across some part of my body while I was driving, but I knew it wouldn't hurt me, so after failing to get it out, I hopped back in and drove the two and a half hours it took me to get home. Thankfully, there were no future sightings (or feelings) but I wasn't worried about my safety. I follow rules and expect other rules in nature to be followed as well, so I am free to do and experience more things based on that knowledge.

On the other end of the spectrum, because I follow the rules, I expect others to do the same and I hate it when they don't. Especially since I am a teacher, I deal with this every day. I had no idea that kids would just refuse to do what they were told. I almost always did in school, and if a teacher ever told me to stop doing something, I would turn bright red and immediately stop. When I'm in a classroom, however, and ask a class to be quiet, I usually have a 0% response rate. Depending on the class, I might have a few students who stop talking and very rarely an entire class listens or is quiet to begin with, but much more often than not, I am completely ignored. I literally cannot understand this. I am incapable of understanding why, when a teacher has told you stop talking multiple times, you blatantly ignore her and continue talking. Is it really that hard to stop? Do you not have to do this in every other class? Do you understand that if you keep talking, there will be consequences? None of this ever seems to register and I get utterly frustrated with being ignored. My number one complaint as a teacher is that students do not listen to me and 80% of the time I am telling them to stop talking so I can talk or so they can take a test.

Ugh, it is so frustrating to be administering a standardized test (or regular classroom test, either way it should be quiet) and have students talk throughout the entire period. My entreaties to stop talking are in vain and after eight or so times of saying "Be quiet, please", "Stop talking", and "Class. There should be NO TALKING during a test!", with no response from the class, I feel like saying completely random and inappropriate things because obviously no one is paying any attention to me. I might as well not be in the room for all the difference I am making. Since I am passionate about both the subject and following rules, when entire classes show no concern for either, I want to scream. I cannot keep going in a job where I show up to work, try to do what I am hired to do but am constantly thwarted in my efforts. I feel so worthless, incompetent and stupid as students ignore everything I tell them to do. I have talked to other teachers, to administrators and others and no one has any answers. No one can force a person to stop talking and follow directions. It's impossible. Punishments such as referrals, lunch detentions, in-school suspensions and loss of privileges happen days later and there is no immediate punishment for the offense. Teaching is increasingly becoming an impossible job.

It's not just me. I observe other classes where the students have no regard for the teacher, who just keeps plowing through the material and teaching to the few who pay attention. When I substitute, often teachers will tell me "Good luck" with a particular class because that class never listens to them either. I don't understand how other teachers can stand to keep being in a classroom where that happens.

It's currently my first day of a seven-week long substitute job for a teacher on maternity leave. It will take me through the end of the school year. Already today students ignored me 13(!) times when I told them to be quiet because they were testing (that was just one class. I didn't add up all the other times I told the other classes to stop talking). When students kept talking, another student pretended to be me and told them to be quiet, talking in a high voice. As I was telling them to stop talking, a boy asked me if they could talk quietly and the rest of the students laughed. Two students were still working on their MAP tests at this time and one girl didn't even get to close to finishing that period, in part because she was so distracted by the rest of the students talking.

Why can't everyone just follow the rules? Life would be so much simpler if everyone did what they were supposed to. I would enjoy teaching and my students would enjoy my class much more if I weren't constantly yelling at them to stop talking when they shouldn't be. I don't mind talking when I'm not trying to teach something or they're taking a test, but we can never get to that point because so much time is wasted while I wait for them to be quiet (it never happens).

31 more days...

Frustration

I really want a job. The problem is, I don't know what kind of job I want. Or how to go about finding one.

I'm a substitute teacher for Beaufort County schools, but in order to get a job, I have to sit at my computer all day and refresh the "available jobs" tab on the subfinder website. So far I've gotten one day of teaching in and I've been trying to get one all week long. Three times I've refreshed pages within 30 seconds and a job pops up, but by the time I click on it to take it, someone else has already clicked on it, is reviewing it, and within a minute, takes it. Jobs go by in a matter of seconds and it always seems like I'm too slow to get one even though I sit in front of my computer and refresh for hours a day. Yesterday I stayed on the web page and refreshed every 10 seconds or so for four hours and never got a job. There is no way I am going to keep this up and I've already pretty much given up on it. I am so sick of sitting in front of a computer screen and feeling tethered to it to get a job. I've never minded it before - a job in front of a screen wouldn't bother me - but I hate depending on it constantly for a job.

Last night I happened to check the Beaufort County School District website for teacher openings and there was one for a middle school English teacher. I'm certified to teach grades 7-12, so I immediately started updating my application to send it, uploading scans of my teaching license and Praxis scores. This afternoon I checked the website again and the job was gone. Sad face. True, I don't really want to teach, but I do want a job and I want to be able to tell my parents I have a job. I wasn't going to tell them about the position unless I got it but I had to upload a copy of my transcript for the application and my transcripts were at home, so I had to call my mom and ask her to find them, scan and email them to me.

I know my parents are disappointed in me that I don't have a job. My mom keeps asking about teaching jobs and telling me I need to be aggressive in finding a position. I would be aggressive if I wanted to teach, but because I don't really want to teach, I have no desire to go out and look for a teaching job. I'll take one if a position opens up, but I'd prefer to do something else.

I did get a phone call from Beaufort County pools where I sent an application to be a lifeguard, scheduling an interview for Monday evening on Lady's Island. The problem is there are several different pools in Beaufort County and I could be sent to any of them. I live near only one of the pools while the rest are 30-50 minutes away, so it's unlikely that I will get this job, which is frustrating. I do really enjoy lifeguarding but it's difficult to make a living doing it. Plus, my parents would really not be very happy with that career decision.

Anyway, I'm just feeling really frustrated that I can't figure out what I want to do, that I don't have a job and that I'm disappointing my parents. Not a fun day.

To teach or not to teach?

I am currently a substitute teacher in a school district that neighbors the one I taught in last year. I have been "activated" to use the subfinder system for three school days including today, and I was able to get a job for one of those days, my very first day I could. I was a little nervous starting out in a new school system, plus I was teaching junior high when I'd been used to teaching high schoolers. I was welcomed warmly by the substitute coordinator in the office as well as several other teachers in the school. In fact, more teachers introduced themselves to me the one day I was in the school than ever introduced themselves to me in the six months I taught at Hardeeville! I enjoyed the 6th, 7th and 8th graders, but I'm still not sure that teaching is for me.

I've been iffy on whether I want to teach for a while now. It's not only because of my difficult experiences at Hardeeville, but because I'm really not that excited about teaching itself. I love the subject and I wish I could just expound on English literature and grammar all day long, but teaching really doesn't have much to do with the subject you teach. I would guesstimate that I spent about 80% of my time as a full-time teacher disciplining, grading and planning and 20% actually teaching the subject. I hate lesson planning with a vengeance, and while grading doesn't really bother me too much, I still have to create something for the students to do for me to grade, which takes far more time than the grading itself. I'm sure it was harder on me than most teachers because a) it was my first year and I came in during the middle of a school year, b) I was never given a curriculum and wasn't sure what to teach, and c) I only had textbooks, no novels, to work with.

During my sixteen weeks of student teaching I spent the first eight weeks in the eighth grade and closely followed the curriculum: much of what I taught was listed out for me, it was just up to me to decide how to present it. I always knew what I was doing the next day or the next week because it was laid out in the huge three-ring binder that noted everything the eighth graders needed to be taught in English that year. The last eight weeks I spent in the eleventh and twelfth grades and was able to teach several novels. Several books were listed in the curricula and I picked the ones I personally liked and understood well. In eleventh grade I taught The Old Man and the Sea in the college-prep and academic classes, Of Mice and Men in the college-prep classes and A Child Called It in the academic classes. In twelfth grade I taught Hamlet and Brave New World, the former one of my favorite Shakespeare plays and the latter one of my favorite books of all time. I loved rereading all of these books (with the exception of A Child Called It, which I hadn't read before) and sharing my enthusiasm for them with my students. I was given some activities to do with the books by other teachers and I came up with some myself.

At Hardeeville, I had to work with basal textbooks. I HATE basal textbooks. I was fortunate enough to make it through school without having to use one and I never thought I would be forced to teach with one as my sole tool. I had nothing else: no projector for PowerPoint, the overheard projector was broken, no Smartboard, no novels, no supplementary materials. The textbooks were IT. I also didn't have enough textbooks for each student in the class to have one, much less each student in each grade to have one, so no one could take a book home. Therefore, I couldn't assign homework, an essential part of high school.

I'm sure I could have done a LOT better at using what I had and been more creative in coming up with assignments and ways to teach concepts. I felt so overwhelmed that I pretty much just gave up a few months into the job and tried to get through the school year. That experience would have made someone who was positive that teaching was her vocation question her decision, but to me, someone who was already not gung-ho about teaching, just about English, it almost killed my desire to ever step foot in a classroom again.

This may surprise you, but I struggled for a long time about whether or not to return to the school this fall. I felt AWFUL for the juniors-come-seniors who were not getting an education that would help them be competent in college and I knew that the school wouldn't get another teacher if I left. (I was right: I've run into some of my former students this fall and they have a full-time sub who is not certified to teach and whom the students do not respect.) I felt it was up to me to help these kids out in a school that was doing them no favors. Yet at the same time, the school wasn't helping me out and it was practically impossible for me to help the kids if the school wasn't helping me. I was overwhelmed and so stressed out that by the week after spring break, I started waking up crying on mornings I had to go to school and had regular nightmares during which I sometimes woke up shouting. The students started mocking me every time I tried to speak, making teaching impossible. I had no control over my classroom and was made to feel incompetent every time I asked the administration for help.

Once I made the decision not to return in the fall, I felt a weight lifted from my shoulders. Now what was weighing down on me was the possibility that I would be unemployed. I had a job lined up for the summer, so I wasn't too worried, but I had no idea what I would be doing come fall. I still don't know what I'm doing, and I need to start figuring out what I want to do. I don't really want to teach, but hopefully substituting will keep me from becoming destitute. What I would like to do is fix everyone's grammar. I notice misused apostrophes and quotation marks all the time, as well as spelling and grammar errors in items such as menus, billboards, flyers, brochures, and sales labels. I would love to review everything that's published - whether it's a company newsletter or a sign taped up in a window advertising a deal - to make sure it doesn't have any mistakes in it.

Now, after I say that, I'm sure I have errors in my own posts. Like I said before, this is just to write things down and get them out there, so I don't go back and proofread anything I've written. I just write it straight through and publish it. I do have another blog though - http://printedmistakes.blogspot.com/ - where I try to keep a record of mistakes I find in the books I happen to be reading.

If anyone wants to hire me to read over their publication before it's put out for the world to see, I'd love to do it!

The final exam incident

Obviously, these posts are not in chronological order, or an order of any kind. This happened near the end of the year when I was giving final exams. I had to write them all by myself, for four different classes, without any help or input from anyone else. The school did not have a Scantron machine, so I would be grading all ~120 exams by myself. I began with the seniors' exams since they had to take theirs before the other grades because they got out a week earlier than the rest of the school.

I hate giving seniors in high school a multiple choice final exam in English for many reasons. First, I never had a multiple choice test in high school English unless it was to prepare for the AP exam and I loved how well my high school prepared me for college. Second, my professors in college had drilled it into our heads that multiple choice questions were almost never the way to go in English classes. However, my students had hardly written anything that year (not because I hadn't assigned it, but because they didn't feel like writing) and I knew it would be much quicker, even without a Scantron machine, to grade multiple choice tests.

Skipping over the actual test-writing process, I ended up with a six page multiple choice exam and a short essay question: Tell me about your experiences with school this year and what you liked/disliked, especially in regards to English class and include what your plans are for next year. I was hoping the students would write this essay because it had to do with them and their lives, not a story or author. I had a length requirement (2 paragraphs, 5-7 sentences in each paragraph) and as long as they fulfilled that requirement, I gave them full credit for the essay.

It came time to give the tests to the seniors. I made about 30 copies of the test and printed out separate answer sheets in order to save paper and make it a little easier to grade. I had called in the assistant principal while I gave my first class of seniors its final because I knew they wouldn't be quiet unless an administrator was there. The AP was a few minutes late, of course, and didn't actually come to my room until I had called a second time, and the students were talking normally after I gave them the test, completely ignoring my exhortations to be quiet. Once the AP came in, they silenced, but not after giving me many dirty looks for calling him in.

One of the students, R, put his head down on his desk as soon as I passed the tests out. I walked over to him, tapped him on the shoulder and said his name. He refused to look at me. I told him he needed to take the exam now or he would receive a zero on it. He still didn't answer. I went to him several times throughout the period as I walked around the classroom, keeping an eye on the students. The AP was standing a few feet away from R while he was in the classroom and watched me try to get R to take the test, but he did not interfere. R never took the test or responded to my telling him that he would fail English if he did not take it.

At the end of the day, I emailed the principal and told her what had happened. I told her that I thought R should have a zero on the test since he had had ample opportunity to take it while he was in class but refused. She emailed me back and told me that I was to never give a student a zero on a final exam since that would cause him to fail the class. She told me to make up a different version of the test and give it to R at a later time that was convenient to him.

I did not agree with her, but I had no choice in the matter. I talked to R and we decided on a date and time two days later. The next morning before school, R came in and demanded to take the test right then. I told him I did not have the test ready since he had told me he could take it the next day. He got very angry and told me he had to take the test that morning because he was going out of town that afternoon. I called the principal and explained the situation to her. She told me to have R take the test that afternoon during my planning period.

That morning my first period class had an assignment that was due the next day and they were to be working on it in class. It was a decently long assignment that involved quite a bit of reading and I gave them the class time to work on it. I taught for the first half of class, then sat down at my desk while they were to be working on the assignment. I got to work on the alternate version of the test I had to give R that afternoon, which was going to take me a while to do since I had 120 multiple choice questions to rearrange/rewrite as well as redo an entirely new answer sheet. The students in the class chose not to work on the assignment even though I stopped them several times and told them they needed to be working on it. I decided it was their decision to put off the work to do for homework and got back to working on the test. With five minutes left in the class, the principal opens the door and walks in. She sees the students not doing their work and from just inside the doorway, speaks to me in a very loud and stern voice across the room to where I was sitting at my desk, telling me that under no circumstances should my students be doing anything besides classwork, that I am not doing my job and I should be in front of the classroom teaching until the bell rings. She tells me to get back to teaching and walks out of the room. I sit, shocked and embarrassed, while my students stare at me and ask if they've gotten me in trouble. By the time I've regained my composure and stand up to walk to the front of the class, the bell rings for the end of the period.

That afternoon, R comes to take his exam before I am done with my 3rd period class. Because he comes unexpectedly and I am already rattled from the morning's humiliation, I accidentally hand him the original version of the test. I soon realize my mistake and switch out tests, telling him he gets his own special version - it has his name at the top. He looks at it, then me, then gets extremely angry and throws a piece of paper at me: an answer sheet he must have gotten from another student. R yells at me for giving him a different version of the test and furiously circles answers on his answer sheet without reading the questions, scribbles an answer to the essay question and hands the test back to me within 3 minutes. I give it back to him with a new answer sheet and tell him to sit down and take the test, that it's not hard and he will do fine on it. He refuses to do so and stomps out of the classroom.

Once again, I email the principal to ask for her advice, though with some trepidation. I have done all that I can to accommodate R, and he will fail the fourth quarter as a result of this test. The principal emails me back and says that in light of that morning, it is obvious that I do not teach my students and she does not believe that I was trying to help R. She tells me to give him a passing grade on the exam, even though I told her he was planning to cheat his way through the original exam and refused to read through his exam.

I read the email and started to cry. Never had I been so frustrated or felt so misunderstood. There is no way R should be passing English this quarter or for the year. He has done NOTHING to deserve a passing grade, putting his head down and sleeping during class and refusing to sit up and do the assignments, making them all up in two days at the end of the quarter so he gets enough credit to pass (yes, there is no limit to how many days the students have to make up work as long as it's in before the end of the quarter, so no one did any work until the week before grades were due, though that's a story for a different day) and yelling at me for failing him the whole time. Yet the principal was backing HIM up, not me.

The funny thing is the test was mostly made up of GED practice questions that I'd taken off a website and were extremely simple. You didn't have to actually have listened in class to get 100% on the test and if you couldn't pass it, you shouldn't have graduated from high school anyway.

The best part of my job

I'm going to take a little break from writing about all the negative things about my time at Hardeeville and write about my hands-down most favorite thing that came out of it.

It all started because I went to all the home basketball games. I was living in a new area with a new roommate, and while we got along very well, she often went to Charleston for the weekends, where she went to college and most of her friends were. I was left alone for the weekend and knew no one else in the area. I also liked supporting my students by going to their games: I just thought it was a good thing to do. So most Friday nights, I went to the high school to watch the varsity girls' and junior varsity and varsity boys' basketball games. There were some Tuesday and Thursday evening games too, and if they were home, I went to them.

As it turns out, I was one of three white people in the entire gymnasium, which was always a full house. Besides me, there was an older white man with a camera, who I found out took pictures and regularly posted them to the local paper's website. The final white person was a younger guy who looked a little older than me. He was at every game wearing khaki shorts, a gray hoodie (not the same one, he apparently had lots of gray hoodies) and writing on a notepad. He usually stood the whole game, most of the time near one end of the court. I noticed him, not only because of his skin color, but because I thought he was attractive. I entertained the thought of talking to him once, when he was wearing a Pitt hoodie, because I have a cousin who goes to Pitt and I thought that would give me a reason to talk to him. The thought quickly passed, however, and I never ended up talking to him.

The varsity girls' basketball team ended up going to the lower state championship game, which was held at a neighboring high school on a Saturday night. I went to it, and once again, the guy was there. I sat near one end of the court and he stood at the end of the court on the same side, taking notes on his notepad. I kept sneaking glances at him, but never thought of going to talk to him when the game was over. He went to go interview the coach and I headed to the parking lot. The Hardeeville girls had won and were headed to the state championship game, but it was the next weekend in Columbia, about 2 and a half hours away from Hardeeville.

Two days later, I was sitting on my couch, checking out Facebook and talking on the phone to one of my friends back in Ohio. I clicked to another page and suddenly a message showed up in my inbox. I opened it, and there was a message from a guy whose name I didn't recognize. Curious, I clicked it open and read the message. It was the guy from the basketball games, saying that he was a reporter for the local newspaper and had noticed me at the games. He knew who I was because, as you may remember from earlier, I had been interviewed by another reporter from the same paper just a few days into my teaching job and my pictures had been on the newspaper's server. He said he had moved to the area the previous spring and knew that it was difficult to meet people, so he was wondering if I would want to meet up with him and some of his friends for dinner one evening. I immediately stopped the phone conversation I was having with a stifled scream, startling my roommate. I quickly explained that the guy I'd told my roommate about (actually, I referred to him as the hot guy from the basketball games) had found me on facebook and sent me a message. I was so excited that he had made the first move since I would never have had the guts to initiate anything.

Wow, this post is getting long. I have so much to say about this, but really long story short, we messaged back and forth, met for dinner with some of his friends that Friday, met on the beach to hang out with my roommate's dog that I was pet-sitting on Monday, texted constantly Tuesday through Friday, had our first official date that Friday night and were inseparable the rest of the weekend.

That was a little over six months ago and we're still spending almost all of our free time together. He's absolutely amazing and I am so so so glad I went to those basketball games!