….it took six of us about five hours to pull it off

It’s been a tough day for me, emotionally. The press was very critical of teachers today. Apparently last Friday over 1600 teachers in the school board next door to the one I work for, called in sick and there weren’t enough supply teachers to cover all the absences. We knew that this might happen when the government took away sick days that teachers had saved over the years and cut back the total number of sick days a year that teachers could use. Any unused days can no longer be carried over to other years so as a result many teachers feel that they have to use them up or lose them.

The problem here is that your colleagues suffer when there aren’t enough supply teachers to cover your absence. Library classes get cancelled, MART teachers are pulled from their class and sometimes teachers lose their prep periods to cover these unsupervised classes. Listening to the radio this morning on the way to school and then again on the drive home left me feeling very depressed. Everyone who hates teachers seems to come out of the woodwork when stories like this are written. These haters paint all of us with the same brush. We were described as greedy, selfish, uncaring, liars and dishonest.

I also spent a great deal of time today dealing with the school that didn’t show up for our soccer game yesterday. The time I suggested yesterday didn’t suit them. At this point I really didn’t feel that I needed to make anymore concessions. They wanted me to play through my lunch hour and they even offered to pay for a supply teacher so that the schools could play in the afternoon. I’ve had to leave work for supply teachers in the past and it’s a great deal of work, especially for art. In the end I told them that there were no more options. They finally agreed to come at the time I had first posted.

After school today a group of us stayed behind at school to organize next year’s timetables. Our principal ordered in chicken and salad for dinner. Even though it took us 5 hours it seemed too easy this year. Either we’ve gotten really good at it or we’ve made a huge mistake that will be discovered in the next day or two. Even if it is correct I know that we won’t please everyone. Each teacher has been given the number of prep periods that they are entitled to but we know that some teachers won’t be happy with how they’ve been distributed. Some want them  all in the morning, or all in the afternoon or evenly distributed or only in periods 1 or 5 and some people may not like who is delivering their prep or which subjects are being covered. The funny part is that anyone who wants to participate in organizing the timetables is welcome to join us but it’s always the same people every year who do the work.

Everyone is a bit on edge these days. Report cards are due next week and people are struggling to finish teaching the curriculum or marking tests and projects. We’ve just finished the grade 3 EQAO province wide testing and we we’re still preparing for the spring concert.

The highlight of my day today was teaching puberty to the grade 5 students. I actually volunteered to do this because I love teaching this part of the health curriculum. My principal thinks I’m crazy. I also loved my art class where most of my students were completely engaged in creating their Picasso portraits. I can’t wait to share them with you next week.

Cheers!