BZ, Baby!

Here's the deal: the first month of teaching in a new school is a nightmare, particularly if you are teaching in a new subject area, or are teaching a new curriculum. I have yet to work in a school that had a full set of textbooks for the students, much less a teacher's edition, working overhead projector, and supplementary materials such as the all-necessary DVD or CD on the first day, let alone the first month. I teach English as a Foreign Language--specifically, preparation for upcoming important exams-- and I can't teach out of my textbooks. Why? The CDs are lost. The tapescripts are lost. The transcripts are lost. My students have expensive textbooks which they can't use because we can't listen to the CD to do the activities which begin, "Listen to the dialogue between the two strangers. Write the words you hear in the blanks."

Now, if I had a teacher's edition of the book--or the transcript--I could reenact the dialogue. As it is, I have to resort to making it up--or worse, just making up something else to do. Even if I had the CD, folks, it wouldn't do any good as the two CD players in the entire school DON'T WORK. I finally broke down and brought in my OWN CD player, as well as my own speakers, because none of the speakers in the classroom work. I teach more than 20 different lessons every week and that is 20 plus lessons being pulled out of thin air, borne of my experience and back log of activities that I stored on a hard drive and which I frantically photo copy before class when I realize that once again, the CD didn't come in... Add to that the absolute frustration of a system that takes away the weekend before a holiday and the weekend after a holiday and declares them "working days" so that a teacher is working 9 or more days straight in order to have three days off in midweek towards the end of the month--and then have the said teacher sent to a conference where no translation is provided on the one day off they have all month--and you have a very tired, bitter little person hunched over her keyboard at 7:24 in the morning snarling, "Well, I'm not posting today EITHER then. Screw the fans, if I had any!"