Work Day One Is Done and Done

(c)2016 Douglas W Davis

My dog woke me up this morning much earlier than I’d planned to get up. It worked out okay though. I was able to get to school for the first workday an hour early. Being early meant I had all that time to work without any interruptions. And I was able to get a lot done during that hour.

The school was eerily quiet at that hour, and it remained so. Without the students there, an empty echo made every sound in the hall reverberate with a lonely tone.

I had a meeting with my Principal at 11:00am and it went very well. Because the Central Office has not given her a final answer regarding how many teachers will be assigned to our school next year, nor have they given her a definite answer about who they might be assigning to our school because their position elsewhere has been eliminated. Until she has all that information she won’t be able tell me what grade level or subject I will be teaching next year.

At least lunch today was very economical. There were plenty of leftovers from the Mexican Buffet our Principal had treated us to the day before. Many of us decided to eat in instead of going out. I worked on preparing a couple of the lists my Principal asked us all to make for her while I ate my lunch.

My teammate stopped by while I was eating lunch and asked me when I was going to go through my home room students’ cumulative folders. 

At the end of each year, we go through the folders to remove paperwork no longer needed and put the paperwork from this year into the folder; paperwork like final report cards, attendance summaries, and End-of-Grade Test results. I told her I was planning to start working on them as soon as I finished my lunch and invited her to bring her folders to my room so we could each sit at one of my tables and spread our paperwork out to help keep it organized.

My teammate returned a short time later, after I’d finished my lunch, and she’d brought my cumulative folders with her. We invited my other teammate to join us but she was in the middle of cleaning out her filing cabinet and declined.

For the next three hours, we checked off items in the folders, removed outdated and unnecessary paperwork, and placed the new documents into where they belonged. We got about half-way through each of our classes. While we worked we talked about the students we were going to miss, and the ones we wouldn’t miss so much. Of course, not knowing what grade level we might wind up teaching next year, we might be seeing some of them again. That would mean a third year with some of them for me. I’m not sure how I would feel about that.

If it happens, it happens, and I will make the best of it.

As always, I remain,

The Exhausted Educator