Spring Break: Not the Typical Drunken Fiasco

I have wasted most of my spring break laying around watching things OnDemand because the shows that I usually watch are either in reruns or I'm all caught up. Celebrity Fit Club and John Adams are the two most recent additions to my List of Shame. Well, actually, I will put John on a different list, because that's not so shameful... but the fact that I have added any more "Celebreality" to my repertoire is frightening.

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Also today, I decided to take care of me. I've been looking atrocious, and so I decided to get my overgrown brows, chewed down fingernubs, and leather-bottomed feet taken care of. Let me tell you: Never underestimate the power of vanity to make such an improvement in the way you feel. My brows are now nice and tame, which somehow makes the huge zit on my cheek less obvious; my feet are nice and smooth (and if it were just slightly warmer out, I'd bust out my Box o' Flops, which I've been eyeballing every day since the First Day of Spring), and my toe and fingernails match in a bright, lovely shade of Tropical Punch. If only I hadn't spent all my money on this endeavor, I would treat myself to a night on the town.

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Alex has been bringing his lunch and dinner to work with him, and since I admire his money-saving attempts, I have been trying to cook real dinners more often so that he can bring the leftovers the following day. And by "trying," I mean I have done it once so far.

What kind of easy things do you cook that would reheat well the next day?

Cooking and Dog Stuff

It's no secret that I'm not the best chef. What's really frustrating about it is the fact that I almost always follow a recipe, and things still don't come out great. Sometimes I try to make things without recipes, but that almost always turns out disasterous. But I'm proud of the dinner I made myself tonight. Alex isn't home, so I decided to cook some shrimp. Easy as pie, and totally yummy. Behold:

1/4 lb. linguini

1/2 lb. shrimp

S & P to taste

flour (I used Wegman's Pan Searing Flour- it's just flour with sea salt and white pepper)

oil (I used Wegman's Basting Oil-- it has garlic, thyme, and parsley in it)

1 chopped shallot

minced garlic

a little butter

a little cream

Salt and pepper the shrimp. Toss in flour. Heat oil in pan. Sear shrimp on both sides; remove from pan. Add shallot and garlic, and cook until soft. Add butter and cream. Bring to a simmer for a few minutes. Pour over shrimp and linguini, and mix it all up. Sprinkle with grated parm.

The whole thing probably would have been totally bland if not for the preseasoned oil and flour, but I'll take the help where I can get it. Just knowing what spices to add to what dishes seems to be most of my problem.

Who knows? Maybe this shitty job situation will make me a really good cook! MAYBE I will decide to ditch teaching all together and go to culinary school! Or MAYBE I will still eat more ramen noodles or boxed macaroni and cheese than anything else.

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Coconut seems to have developed an obsession with the computer cursor. As I sit here writing this, here is what she is doing:

If I shift my body, she walks around me to the other side. If I sit so the computer screen is facing away from her, she peeks her head around the side. She is relentless, and it drives me crazy! I can't even get away from it if I sit with the computer at the desk, because she jumps up the side of my leg.

At least she doesn't beg for food...

The Short of It

At my post-observation meeting yesterday, my VP said (and these are not his exact words, but rather, how it translated in my head), "If you are a teacher trying to get tenure, and you're going to the administration for help, the administration will just think, 'instead of giving her tenure, why don't we just hire someone else who already knows what to do?'"

So I guess I dug my own grave, in asking for help and all. This wasn't any kind of official meeting about next year, but I'm taking the hint and writing up my resume over spring break. I'm having my mom ask her own superintendent if it will look better to potential districts if I have resigned or if I am non-renewed, and also, how to answer the inevitable Interview Question, "Why did you decide to leave X City?"

Something tells me, "I am fucking burnt out from those kids and that district," wouldn't be appropriate.

I woke up this morning feeling all depressed, and decided that rather than sit around alone and mope all day, I'd go to my parents' house. My mom brought me coffee in my favorite Winnie the Pooh coffee cup, and my dad my dad came home from errand-running with what was perhaps the Sweetest Gesture Ever: sushi and a stuffed monkey.

I love living with Alex, but sometimes it is just so nice being Home.

Hoping for a Metamorphosis

In keeping with a drunken theme... I can't sleep soundly anymore if I don't drink before I go to bed. This is not to say I'm drinking every night before bed. Mostly, it's just to say I haven't really been sleeping. Also, I seem to have crossed over into that place where my stomach is so filled with butterflies all the time, there is no room for food.

I received my third and final formal observation last week. The VP came in during a time when my schedule said, "Breakfast and Morning Meeting." The previous week, my special ed director told me to reduce academics until behaviors were under control. So when he came in, instead of doing/crumpling up/ripping in half the usual math papers that I had always left on my students' desks each morning, my class was playing with silly putty while waiting for their breakfast. Silly putty, people. At the time, I thought I was providing them with a soothing morning activity. This is especially true for some of the students with sensory issues. The kids weren't great, but they weren't as bad as they would have been with work in front of them. Well, I guess looking back I can see how ridiculous this is.

The observation notes my lack of adequate, time-aware planning, my "concerning" morning activity, and my disregard for individual student needs. There is more, but those are the highlights. I have not had my post-observation meeting with him yet, and so all of this keeps going around and around in my head. I want him to know my reasons for doing what I was doing at the time, but I don't want to sound like I'm defensive. And the same time, I really want to give him the finger and tell him where to put his fucking observation.

Anyway, during spring break, I'm going to start putting an updated resume together. This is not to say I won't get my job back for next year (though I am very uncertain), but truthfully, I don't think I want it back. My dream is to get canned, then magically fix my class, find a job elsewhere, have my current district change its mind and offer to renew me for next year, and say, "Hm, no thanks. I found a way better, less stressful job in Xtown." Okay, well maybe that's not really my dream, because the fact of the matter is, I will be mortified if I am not rehired for next year. And I know, I know, everything happens for a reason, and when one door closes, another one opens, and all that crap that my mom has been saying in an attempt to make me feel better about all of this. But damn it, these butterflies won't go away.

Drunk Haiku

People have asked me
For three years now why I don't
Become an alcky

I say to them: third
year's a charm! I just had a
bottle of reisling!

What's Cooking

I don't like the first entry you see on my blog on a Monday morning to be all depressing. So I'm adding another, more upbeat entry. Look below for the depressing entry, because you won't find it up here, nosiree!

Because I've been stressed lately, and because there are a ton of things for me to procrastinate, I have been cooking. And no, not my usual bowl of ramen noodles, Lean Cuisine, or cheese quesadilla-- real food!

On Tuesday, I made chili. I searched the internets for a good recipe, and I found one that proved to be so good that Alex actually ate firsts, seconds, AND took the leftovers to work the next day!! This has never happened before in our entire year and a half together. Usually I cook something, he says it's good, and then when he's finished his first helping, he searches around the kitchen for something else to eat. Occasionally, he'll eat a second helping. Never does he eat leftovers.

He loved this chili so, that he even passed it off as his own creation to his coworkers. *Screetching halt noise* Yes. He made his coworkers try it, and then he said HE made it. I have not yet figured out an appropriate punishment for this, and so a shocked, "WHAT?! You're a jerk," is about all he got. I am letting it go because he liked it enough to pretend he made it, and so I guess that's a compliment.

Amazingly, I had two successful cooking experiences in one week. I also made a chicken pot pie from scratch. There was only one slight fumble along the way: I misjudged how shallow the pie plate was, and so when I poured the gravy over the filling, it overflowed everywhere. Next time I'll just mix up the filling with the gravy and spoon it all in at once. And let's look back at the words, "next time," because again, TheJerkBoy liked it enough for me to make it again!

Success!

Rock Bottom?

I hate my job. I don't think I've really mentioned it before, mostly because it wasn't always so. In fact, although most other people I know would hate my job, I always found that to be one of its drawing traits. Look what I can do that you'd never in a million years have the patience for...

Yeah, well. My patience have run out.

For two years, I have been getting praise from various important people around my district: my administrators, members of the child study team, my department supervisor, principal at the middle school, the superintendent. They actually made the middle school behavioral teacher come observe me because they thought she might learn something. She had been teaching for several more years than I had.

I'm not saying all this to toot my own horn. If you actually could see the state of things right now, you'd understand why I need to look back on these memories.

I'm not really sure how to explain things, because it has been happening little by little since September, and it is the culmination of so many things, and I also don't want to be too specific because, you know, public blog. I guess the short version is that most of my students were used to one particular behavior management system used by their previous teacher. When they were passed along to me, I adopted said system for consistency (since it had been working for two years), except that, beyond my control, one key component was missing: a place for students to go when they became out of control.

And then I got a new student. This student is much more street smart than the rest of my bunch, and introduced to my class lovely phenomena such as The Finger and Sarcasm ("Ohhh... I'm soooo scared of losing free time..." "Oh, like you're really hurting me by not giving me that reward...") He realized that the other students looked up to him and would copy him, and so his reaction to things he didn't like, no matter how small, was explosive. Then, he began running around the room, getting in other kids' faces, yelling. He figured out that as long as he wasn't physically hurting anyone, he could be as out of control as he wanted to be, and there was no real consequence of value to him. He wasn't removed from the room because there was nowhere for him to go. And the other kids took it allll in. And started to copy.

It wasn't long before my room started spiraling out of control. I went to various people in my school for help (including admin), and no one really gave me any kind of usable advice. They would listen to me, maybe vent about other administrators and what they weren't doing, but no one helped because I don't think they knew what to do either. So it became my fault.

These are students who already don't listen to their parents, stopped listening to me, and also stopped listening to administrators. What kid isn't afraid of the principal? Mine aren't. Yet I am being told that I gave up my authority. What about the principal? What about their parents? I have become the scapegoat.

I follow the school's mandated curriculum. I asked for alternate programs because I believe the ones we are given (mostly scripted, direct instruction, and lack of manipulatives) are not appropriate for special ed students. I was told that it will not be changed, I must use it, and I can make adaptations where I see fit. I did just that, and now I am being told that my lessons are "not engaging enough." I teach the lessons I am supposed to teach in the same way that the whole school is supposed to teach them, and now I am being faulted for following their shitty boring state mandated lessons.

My department supervisor told me to cut down on academic tasks until their behavior is back under control. I did this, and then I was observed by an administrator who told me that what I was doing was "not academic enough," and that he was "concerned" about my chosen methods.

I do not have tenure yet, and so my job for next year is at risk. On one hand, I feel secure in that I am dual certified (regular and special ed), and that I have experience in a district and a type of classroom that looks impressive on any resume. I could probably find a job anywhere else, but of course, my salary would start at Step 1 again. On the other hand, What the Fuck? My contract might not be renewed because I am having trouble controlling a group of children that no other person in the school is able to control?? I have heard other teachers mention that the possibility being given my class is a school-wide worst nightmare.

Sigh. So anyway, in the meantime, now that it's too late, I have finally been giving permission to change up the curriculum. Tomorrow I am visiting two other similar (but of course, "better managed") classrooms in different schools tomorrow to get ideas.

Some people get stressed and lose their appetite. I have never been blessed with such a fortunate reaction to stress. Instead, I pig out, break out in stress hives all over my hands, and my lip erupts with a pleasantly pink and possibly transmittable cold sore. (Read: I am gaining weight, I can't stop scratching, and I can't even kiss my boyfriend.)

I don't know. Maybe I'm just being whiny. And if so, thanks for listening.