Frustration

How effed is my school? This district? I just can't grasp how things can be so poorly run when seemingly intelligent people are in charge. As I said yesterday, our school is without air conditioning in more than half of the building. We're half way through the first week of school, yet we don't have reading or mathematics curriculum. See any news story, TEA press release or, oh, the federal law relating to it and you'll figure out pretty quickly that reading is extremely important, not only for the obvious reason that people must be able to read to function in society, but because schools, namely schools like mine, are in bad shape and we've got to raise our test scores to dig ourselves out of this miserable hole.

I don't know as much about the education code or what went into creating the new high-stakes tests as I should. Sadly, I probably know more than any of the other teachers at my school, though, since I spent the two years prior to becoming a teacher writing about education for a newspaper. This is why I became a teacher: I got sick of writing about how great things were for all these rich white kids - how all their teachers are fabulous and experienced and the kids all easily got into whatever wonderful college they wanted. I'm exaggerating, of course, but when you stop to think about it, it's really just plain unfair how many advantages, yeah, rich white kids get.

I'm getting away from myself...and now I shall do it again. In my attempt to better my knowledge of my current job's requirements, I decided to look at a website about No Child Left Behind. Gross! It's just another place filled with GWBush propaganda.

Now I feel all frustrated, buried in my hatred of stupid administrators, a stupid president, and the fact that half of my class doesn't even know the alphabet in English. 

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I've got to think about something else. I think about school when I eat. I dream about it when I sleep. My social life is dead and buried now that school's back in session.

I need to buy Yo La Tengo tickets. Hell, I need to buy their latest album. And other ones too...all my records are played out. I'm bored with music. Not bored with music, really, just the records that I own. Back in college, I always knew what was coming out, what was good, always had a ton of great things to listen to. Now when I'm in the car, it's NPR all the time. This is not a bad thing, but does signal to the fact that I'm getting old.