weirded out

This is a pix taken by a friend of mine on Maui, up in the hill country near where he lives, in Kula. It is very beautiful up there, reminding me of CA's Napa Valley, or my own Virginia foothills to the Blueridge.

I wasn't going to whine overmuch about work anymore. But today, 2 incidents happened within an hour of each other that so boggled my mind that I had to vent a little wee bit. I've been assessing students for a teacher the past couple o' days, doing a 1:1 interview, testing them in math. I love this sort of thing, and have done a lot of it, in past jobs. I was taking detailed notes on what the kids knew and could do, on an assessment sheet, and the teacher I was working for came up, and out of the blue started correcting the capitalization of my notes. I had assumed the notes were sort of "for teacher eyes only" and so I had taken some of them in incomplete sentences, and hadn't capitalized perfectly. So she's standing over my shoulder fixing my lowercase "d" into a "D" and suggesting that I be more consise and brief in my notetaking, that the assessments were taking too long. Apparently 28 kids in 2 days is too slow. It is not the ONLY thing I do in this class these days. I am also teaching. It just floored me. I honestly couldn't think of anything sassy to say.

This is the same teacher who commented that my curled up posture at my desk (behind the bookshelf) didn't look very professional; what if a parent came by and saw me with my legs propped up against the desk? Mind you, this is at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon; our campus isn't exactly crawling with parents out looking for evidence of professionalism.

Okay...in the past week, I've been called on my handwriting, my posture at the desk, my notetaking, the speed at which I assess children and my punctuation. These are all the sorts of things these teachers hound their students about; work speed, posture, handwriting, proper use of capitals... I wonder how many more little offenses I can commit here? The bizarreness of it all is that it's all coming from peers, not anyone in a position to assess me. As far as I know, with admin, I'm in okay shape.

My reaction to this nonsense has been to laugh it off and to just say "I was taught to do it this way" or "you might want this information eventually" or the very blunt "28 kids in two days is a lot of kids for one person to assess." But it does grind me down, because I've never been hounded like this; not in my teaching life, anyway. It's all sort of adding up to that stinking cloud of negativity that's festering away, right now. I could analyze it, but don't really want to do so in this public forum.

Now, campers, this sloppy writer is going to bed.