work vent

Maybe if I make a list of all the things that are bothering me at work, it won't suck as much?

• My classroom is way too small. Not enough room to walk around students. Not enough room to lay out materials. Definitely not enough room to separate and/or isolate students who are disruptive. Complete chaos, often. If you want them to stay in their chairs, you have to give them lots of materials and manipulatives and things at the their table to work with. If you can't rearrange the room, you have to let them get up and work in groups and be creative. It's impossibly limiting to have neither control over the room environment nor space to move around. Can you imagine teaching a class in the confines of your dining room? Without redecorating? It's kind of like that.
  
• From one to three extra adults on Mondays and Wednesdays cramps the room even more. I'm thankful that we now have a push-in resource teacher, but still. With zero adults it was already overcrowded.
• Co-carpool duty teachers often just hang out instead of helping. One is sometimes on her Blackberry. Blackberry usage during supervision or "on-time" should be reprimanded, in my opinion. It's worse than teaching with your Bluetooth headpiece on, because at least then you can still make eye contact with your students.
• The church continues to leave extra things in the classroom, like rocking chairs, diaper bins, and crap on top of the closet that could totally fall on someone's head in an earthquake.
• Plus they use our whiteboards, after protesting against putting them up in the first place.
• On shortened days, the sixth grade is relegated to the cafe. So in addition to losing an entire period, we also must move seventy five textbooks. All so that a certain math teacher may occupy our room WHY I DON'T KNOW. Seriously, I brought this point up when we discussed room placements, that it doesn't make sense to displace US with a displaced HER, she has to move anyways so why doesn't she move straight to the cafe and leave our class in our room instead of moving her class AND moving our class, and NO ONE WAS ABLE TO COUNTER THIS ARGUMENT, yet, we were forced to "Just try it."
  
• Why don't I have information about my IEP kids and it's already the end of October? I am failing students left and right because no one has even told me if they are dyslexic or blind or lazy. It's not like I haven't asked. (Several times.) I am trying my best to play detective but I'm not trained for this. I fear that this could be a liability and the parents are going to be really mad come report cards.
• Teeny, tiny, miniscule closet. It's a few inches bigger than my TV cabinet. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that that is the only storage we have in the classroom for both English, History, and Geography.
• Co-teachering is not at teamwork level yet. Inching along.
• No windows. They cleaned our carpet last night. It is going to smell like dog tomorrow.
• Am going to have to begin teaching an elective in November, even though I and the other humanities teachers have MORE classes and LESS preps than everyone else. I do love electives, I just desperately need the extra two periods.

Whew. I'm going to stop now because it's time to brush my teeth. I feel slightly better because I boiled down the room thing into that great dining room metaphor.