The week of the missing supplies and six too many students

I've enjoyed a relaxing and well deserved long weekend with my younger sister who was visiting from Ithaca. (Good times were had by all.) We have finished the first three weeks of school (woo hoo!), and it's looking like a Fantastic year! I'm glad we have tomorrow off for Yom Kippur because I still have SO much grading to do.

Why so much work you ask? I haven't been able to get as much done during my free periods as I would like. Granted, sometimes I get caught up in conversations with the ladies I share my office with (read: gossip, and google image searching shenanigans), but for the past couple weeks I've mainly been running around trying to track people down. The first drama was the case of the missing projection screen. I received a screen from www.donorschoose.org and it was apparently delivered to me at school in April. The delivery never made it to me, so I had to track it down. It took a couple days but the screen is now safely in my possession. The process to actually acquire the screen was intense though, having to talk to various administrators, but mostly having to wait to talk to them.

The second time sucker involved me fixing other people's mistakes. Sorry, but we need to be honest with each other: freshmen do not have any business taking AP classes. Because my class is set at 24 students (as there are only 24 books), someone decided the 11 extra seats could be used for 9th graders who had no other place to go. Fantastic. The AP required reading list covers rather intense topics: graphic sex, rape, death, suicide, etc. A little bit much for someone 13 or 14 years old. Last Friday I was awarded 6 freshmen. Hello. It took all week to resolve this issue and I'm not even sure it's fully resolved, we'll see how many show up tomorrow. It took a full week of 1. tracking people down, 2. being told it was someone else's fault and there was nothing anyone could do, 3. different people agreeing that there should not be freshmen in an AP literature class and it would be fixed, but that as a result the schedules of the entire student body would be changed.....all right. Since people forget about using telephones, most communication takes place via messenger or in-person meetings only, thus taking 8 years longer than necessary.

My 3rd drama isn't resolved yet, and is causing me a little bit of grief. I received a cart from donor's choose last year, a cart that was locked in what I thought was a safe place over the summer, which is now gone. Boo. I know things get stolen in our building (by adults, mind you) so I locked it in a book room (read: a locked bookroom, only one key in the building). This should be a pretty simple problem to resolve, should be. Except for the fact that I need to 1. track people down, 2. be passed around from person to person, 3. rinse and repeat to get anything done.

My goals for the coming week? I want to get my seating chart and grade book set up, grade tests, and track down my beloved cart! Trust me, there will be updates, possibly a missing cart sign.

For a reminder about Donors Choose, check out this old post.