Guess How Many Ways my School Board wants to Contact Me? Nope - more.

I don’t know if our Board is weird/unique or what have you, but there are a disproportionate number of ways they can contact us, as staff. 

To call it redundant would be an insulting, libelous, slander to redundancy. Let me walk you through the 9 (NINE! Are you kidding me!) ways that we can be communicated at:

• Mail: For real. Regular, postal service mail and our in-school mailbox system of paper slips from guidance, the library, the main office, special education and what-have-you. It’s almost quaint in its old-tymey-ness, so I barely even resent it. Don’t get me wrong -I do resent it, but not on the scale of some of these other intrusions.

• Home (landline) Phone Number: Okay, admittedly, this was given when I was first hired. It is still valid, and (I’m guessing here) will only be used in the event of a global communications meltdown to let me know whether or not school was cancelled. It might be used to contact my spouse to let her know I’ve been hurt in a chalky-hands related disaster, but they actually already have…

• My Spouse’s Cell Number: Just in case I cut my thumbs off using a paper chopper and need to be medi-evac’ed by an actual chopper to the hospital.

• My Cell: I’ve gotten voicemail here from work, but I also get texts from other teachers, VPs and the Principal. None of the messages are ever good news. Why in the hell did I give them my real number?

• My Work number: It doesn’t actually ring - it just goes through to a voicemail box with the...slowest… robot… voice… menu… devised. I hate it. On principle (the principle of forgetfulness) I only check my voicemail once a month. Why not more often? Because...

• Our Department/School Phone/Paging me in my class: If there is an honest to goodness emergency (or even some shit that doesn’t live in the same time zone as an emergency) the main office/our department each have their own respective number that can be used to talk to a human who will page my class and interrupt a lesson.

• ‘Work only’ Email. Hosted on Board servers and using the worst donkey-balls-of-a-software web interface to connect. It has extremely limited storage space and the SPAM filter is fooled more often than a senior citizen talking to Nigerian royalty. And, AND! inside this email account there are at least three separate folders/message boards I’m expected to read. I’m going to be a sport and not count those as distinct channels to contact me.

• Student email: Hosted with Google and the only email with any reasonable amount of storage space so I obviously have to have all student work sent to this account for marking purposes. Probably the only one I don’t actively hate AND IT IS FULL OF GRADING TO DO! What does that say about all the other crap communication I receive? Nothing good. 

• REMIND/CREW/Other contact App: I could be using all of them, but again, to be fair, I will lump them together. It was awesome when 100+ staff members all joined CREW this week and my phone twitched like a fentanyl junkie every few minutes with the canned “Mr. TECHMORON has joined CREW and wants to say HI” default test messages. Now I doubly hate my phone and triple-ly hate my coworkers. Great team building!

How many ways can your school contact you? 

Can anyone beat my number?

6 Things that Movies and T.V. get wrong about Teaching

Teaching is one of those professions that ends up in movies and television shows a lot. Sometimes the whole show is about Teachers (Boston Public anyone? I don’t want to hear your fond recollections - that show was nonsense). Sometimes Teachers just figure into the background (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off).

The one thing they ALL have in common is that they get many fundamental things about teaching horribly wrong.

Let’s run down a list of the worst lies told on film about teaching as a career.

• Class size: Are you kidding me? No wonder Robin Williams was able to change so many damn lives in Dead Poets Society - his class had, like, 18 students. I mean, Private School, I get it, but still - LIES. My smallest class might have that many kids on a Friday, but all that means is a bunch of follow-up note-chasing and calls home because 8-10 kids were skipping. Next time you see a teacher on film - count the students: if there are over 20 in a room, I’ll buy you a beer.

• That A-hole punk Kid is a Secret Genius/Artist/Musician/Tap Dancer/All of the above: Yeah, actually no. Usually if it walks, swims and quacks, it is a duck, not a mathematician. 

• Lesson Content: Most writers seem to realize that every trial isn’t the dramatic Law-&-Order-Jack-McCoy closing argument grandstand and that every hospital patient doesn’t have a rare disease that gets diagnosed at the last minute to save them. Police procedurals and Hospital dramas at least make some attempt to strike a balance. But for whatever reason there is an idea in Hollywood that every lesson taught in every classroom is a life-changing, hands-on, immersive, multimedia experience. Some of my lessons flat out suck. Where is the movie where seatwork is assigned so the teacher can finish overdue marking while eating the lunch they skipped for coaching? I want to see that one!

• Field Trips: If I ran Field Trips with the reckless abandon of Ms. Frizzle in Magic School Bus, I would be fired soooo fast. No permission forms from parents, no permission from the principal, no clear educational objectives in her proposal. And did she even call ahead to verify 2 million dollars in liability insurance at the locations she visits? I’m betting that no, she did not. And students having ‘exciting misadventures’ on a field trip makes for a good movie, but it gets real teachers written up, suspended without pay and/or shitcanned.

• School Facilities: For the love of everything, why does every TV or movie high school have natural lighting, tall ceilings, arched doorways and lovely wooden panels? If you ever see graffiti, broken infrastructure or a hint garbage, it means that the school is a ‘slum’ or ‘it’s the last day of class and everybody DGAF’. In my school, if you see graffiti, exposed wiring or trash, that means it’s Tuesday.

• The “Emotional Student-Teacher Bond”: Looks great on screen. Generally creeps out parents and other teachers in real life. See Trips, Field above for details about getting written up, suspended and shitcanned. Also: Jail.

What makes you cringe when watching a movie about Teaching and Schools?