Teachers and staff came back on Monday, but naturally I was one of the first people at the Primary School. I made sure the new fingerprint hardware was working so we could all sign in with our prints instead of waiting so long for our turn at a book, eliminating problems caused by sneaky teachers and getting them into the classroom sooner. So far it's been working okay, I had to re-register 1 or 2 people and show a couple others how not to break the scanning screen, but it's not been as bad a transition as I feared. I was doing lots of little things in the office and waiting for a staff meeting so I could go over my Classroom Management notes again, but those happen in the afternoon and I'm usually at the Middle School by then. I tried talking to a couple of the educators about co-teaching with them this year, since I hardly did any of that last year, but they wanted me to completely take over their classes. I played the money card, “No way, you're getting paid to be in class, I'm just volunteering to help” and got out of that quick.
I'd been telling the Principal, David, that I wouldn't be doing all the computer software stuff again this year. Last year my life was dominated by SA-SAMS, the software the DoE requires schools to use but doesn't offer much support or training for. I entered all of the assignments and grades for all 870+ students for the last 2 terms of the year. I refuse to do it again this year for 2 reasons: first, I'm not being utilized as a Resource Specialist and not in the classrooms where I want to be, and second, if I continue then they would never find someone else to do the work and when I leave the school would be up a creek. So I've said I'll help train a new Administrative Assistant and the teachers on how to enter their own grades, but that's all. By Thursday we had a new Admin Assistant.
Learners came back to school on Wednesday, and it's been mass chaos pretty much ever since. The educators surprised me with their enthusiasm to be back at work, but no one seemed to have any lesson plans prepared or even knew what subjects they'd be teaching this year. Plus we spent until Friday afternoon finalizing the schedule of classes, so teachers either went to random classes at random times of the day, or not at all. What a great start to the new year, huh? Friday an educator/assistant manager of the school asked me where she could put me in the schedule, what classes could I teach (because surely I could take over some of hers, right?) and I said I'd love to co-teach with her, but she always had to be in the room with me. She agreed, checked the schedule and saw that her first class of the day is supposed to end in 10 minutes, so we'd better go introduce ourselves. That class happens to be Lebo's and he seemed excited when I walked in. Teacher says “Hello students, I'm Mrs. B and this is Gina and we will be teaching you maths this year. Sometimes it will be me and sometimes it will be Gina. Gina, just say a few words.” I started to tell her and the class I prefer my African name, Itumeleng, or Tumi (like tomb-ee) for short, but she walked out and left me hanging. So I asked the kids a few questions about what they remembered from last year and called out multiplication table questions until the class ended. I tried to explain the concept of co-teaching to Mrs. B but she looked at me blankly and then ran off to do something else. It's already frustrating.
The Middle School also didn't have a schedule, so the first period of the day every teacher took a class and tried to assign them enough busywork to keep them quiet all day. Of course that didn't happen, the learners took to running around the yard with the Principal chasing them with her whip when they got too loud. I hate that whip, but I haven't actually seen her strike a kid with it and I know she uses it to break up the knife fights at school, so I don't say too much. Anyway, that's how the first week of school went, and the first 3 out of 50 teaching days this term were wasted.
No comments:
Post a Comment