[Martina]

One more day and still there's paperwork. They say that many teachers leave the field because of the paperwork. I can understand it. I have two huge closing files to put together tomorrow. About four hours of the kind of work that causes me to throw pens across the room. Seriously. And THEN I can close up the room and leave.

My paperwork looks messy, but it's all done. And it's for real. A first-year teacher told me today that she had not graded her students' math homework all year. She only teaches one math class, thank god. She just marks the work done and enters it in the online gradebook. I can imagine alternating, grading every other assignment and marking the alternate one done. But to grade nothing? All year. She discovered at the end of the year that one student had simply copied the problems without doing them -- all year. But this teacher had all her grades entered in the computer on time, etc. Everything looked good. I do empathize with her. She's first year and is in grad school at night. I have seen her work with kids. She's fine. But damn.

Another teacher, a very experienced teacher, hadn't done a single IEP all year until about a month ago. She hadn't even done one from the 12/13 school year. So I helped her. She also screwed up some stuff and nearly caused a kid not to be able to walk at graduation. She didn't double check. Man, I quadruple check where graduation is concerned. I drive those poor clericals crazy. I actually caught her error -- accidentally. And she was so oppressed and passive when I called her up that I redid the paperwork for her and called everyone and his uncle and got the kid's diploma printed and so on. He wasn't in the program, and his gown was laughably too short (a leftover one not used last year). But, his parents saw him walk.

The thing is that her area is always neat as a pin. Perfect. She LOOKS like she's got it all under control. But the curriculum she uses is the crap that has been in the files for YEARS. She doesn't create anything new herself. And then she does stuff like this. There are other examples. She forgot to enter a kids' grades for an entire semester -- like two years ago. The kid kept complaining that he should have more credits. So finally I looked at his transcript, saw a missing semester, and asked her if he had attended that semester. She fixed it then. But she made the error -- I don't blame her for that -- and then didn't pay attention to the kid. (I look at my students' transcripts all the time. I have to to keep them in the right classes -- not give them too many credits in one subject and too few in another. It gives me chills to think she is not looking at transcripts very often.) ANYWAY, these are just the things that somehow came to my attention, so how much more must there be?

I like both of these teachers fine as people and think they are good with kids. But seriously? I mean, seriously? What honks me off is that my paperwork is raggedy ass and gets the raised eyebrow from the coordinator, but it's graded for god's sake. And it's all there. And my IEPs are done, and my graduates walk. Seriously, if I hadn't seen that kid's name on a list that implied his enrollment was ongoing and then asked about it, he would have had a sad shock. The teacher hadn't even looked at that list. Oh well.

I sound more self-righteous than I feel. But I don't know who the people we are supposed to aspire to be are. Are they the folks who are still at school at 11pm every night? I can't do that. There aren't too many of those folks either. Is everyone else who looks good like these other two teachers, faking it in one way or another? I wonder.

Because, in fact, it's too much. No one can do this much stuff and make it look good unless they are super-teacher. I am not. I guess I'd rather be raggedy ass and legit. I do not know how the other ones live with themselves.