impatiently waiting

I went on vacation this week, and it was fun. It was also a pleasant distraction from my thoughts of the impending school year. I didn't think about class rosters, gradebooks, homework assignments, or any of that crap while I was away. As soon as I got home, though, I was kind of expecting to see my beginning-of-the-year packet in the mail. Afterall, teacher workdays start a week from Monday. I'm sure that by now they at least have a schedule for me, so I can start planning how my days will go.

The all important tidbit, of course, is when my planning period will be. All teachers wait eagerly to hear when that will be. It's our moment of peace in the day, when we don't have to deal with students. It's when we get to do all that teacher stuff. Like...copying things, for our students to do. Grading papers that our students did. Making angry marks on the papers that our students (I just typed "stupids" ...Freudian slip anyone?) filled out incorrectly, or worse, copied off of other students. Often they've copied it off of students that have filled it out incorrectly. Double whammie. Planning period is the time we get to call the parents of the students that did something great, or more often, something stupid. It's a chance for us to go talk to other teachers about ways to help certain students understand something, or new ways to present things to our students.

Yep. No dealing with students at all during your planning period.

Oh yeah, I also forgot to mention that often students will come to make up tests or quizzes during your planning period.

Anyway. I'd really just like to know when my planning period will be, and which classes I'll be teaching when. I really don't think that's too much to ask for. But, I guess all these crazy delays in scheduling info are because my school is in the process of switching from our old system, SIMS, to our new system, NCWise. Don't let the name fool you. It probably should have been called NCrefreakingtarded, but that was surely too long to be easily remembered. From what I've gotten to do with the system so far, it has a few minor improvements over SIMS, but mostly just sucks. Sure, I'm supposed to have all my students' contact information right at my fingertips...and it's there all right. But most of the phone numbers are no longer in service, or missing all together, and that's about as much as I can get to from it. Email addresses? Nah, too logical to make those easily accessible on the web. I'm supposed to be able to look at my students' full schedules, so I can see what other classes they're in, and how they're doing. Oh, right, but I didn't have access to that information...it's classified. Oh yeah, and when the database converted grades from numeric to letter grades, the system translated 77s as Ds when they're supposed to be Cs, so we all had to go back and change the grade by hand for every student that got a 77. I had a lot of mediocre achievers last semester, which means I had a lot of 77s to fix...

Upon further reflection, it seems that the fact that I still don't know what I'll be teaching 2 weeks from now can clearly be blamed on NCTard. Way to go, state inflicted programming.