Public Service Announcement

Read all contracts before signing onto a job.  Otherwise, you may be obligated to go into work for an overnight shift before your regular morning shift on your day off even if you’ve been out drinking.

And don’t hang up on your boss.

Otherwise, some temp is going to transcribe your phone conversation and wonder if you were able to successfully bring charges against your employer, or if they were able to get a lawful termination for your temper.

Overheard at work

I was minding my own business in the office, when a little kindergartner came in and said:

My tummy hurts.  I need to put some alcohol in it.

In my experience, that might only make it worse.  I just sent her to the nurse for an ice pack.

Update on Anger (2). And Idiocy

The little Angry dude isn’t here again today.  His mom called this morning and said that he fell out of bed and broke his ankle, so they had to take him to the doctor.  She wondered if he did it on purpose.

Seriously, folks.  There’s a point where you stop blaming the fourth grader for not wanting to go to school, and look at what might actually be going on.  Come on!

———-

I took a call this afternoon from a parent who received a court order to appear regarding her daughter’s truancy.  She said “I know she had missed some school earlier in the year but she hasn’t missed any lately.  She’s been there every day.”  I was the only one in the office at the time so took down her number for someone to call her back.  Then I asked who her daughter’s teacher was.  And the woman, I kid you not: turned around and said, “[insert daughter’s name]!  Who’s your teacher?”

Yes, school is in session today.  And her daughter is not here.

Update on Anger

Still at the school.  In the 30 minutes before the start of the day my phone is flooded with calls from parents who are keeping their kids home sick (and at least four are out with strep right now.  SO glad my health insurance just kicked in).

Who should call, but the mom of the kid we sent home on Monday.  She said “[insert name] won’t be in today.”  To which I said, “okay, is he out sick?”

“No,” she answered.  “He missed the bus on purpose and he is refusing to go today.”

I took down the message and gave it to the idiot who works in the office here, the same one who actually sounded like she had some insight when talking to him about anger, and she just went off on how parents spoil their children (see yesterday’s Enabling post).  I do think that’s very, very true in this day.  We’re so concerned about whether or precious snowflakes are happy and whatnot that we forget to show some discipline and guidance (and I say that a bit hypocritically, since my dog has a horrible habit of assuming that any food on the coffee table is fair game and I think it’s funny so I let him do it most of the time).

But there’s something going on with this kid.  And I feel so sorry for him.

And, as is the norm these days, I just feel powerless to do anything about it.

Enabling

Back at the elementary school today.

A lot of teachers are out sick today.  A lot of kids are out sick.  Which means, inevitably, I will get sick before the end of the week.  How fun.  But, becaue there are teachers out, there are also a lot of subs.

A few minutes after the start of the school day, I got a call from a parent reporting her child sick.  I said, “okay, what class is he in?” and she launched into this story about how they had gotten to school, but they walked into the classroom and the teacher wasn’t there, and it was a sub.  And her son doesn’t like subs.  And she mentioned to the sub that her son doesn’t do well with other teachers (and, as a former sub myself, I know how much fun it is to talk to parents sometimes), and he answered “well, if he doesn’t feel well we’ll send him to the nurse’s office.”

Perfectly reasonable in my mind.  But not to the mother.  She hauled her kid home and called him in sick because obviously “that teacher doesn’t even care.  I mean, he could have said hi.”

No, lady.  The teacher’s job is to foster whatever kind of short-term bond and discipline he has with the kids in his own way once the parents have left.   If they want to, as a sub, be able to have any control over there classroom, they have to do it on their own terms.

The woman just showed up here at the school to complain about the sub.  And moan and groan about how her son can “sometimes” read, but the next day he doesn’t recognize the letters.  During this conversation, staged at my desk, it came to light that he has four older siblings, but there’s a pretty big gap between him and the rest.  And that the kid is late nearly every day, and the family’s about to get in trouble with the truant officers because he’s missed so much.  “But,” she said, “it’s just so hard for him to get up and here by 9.30.”

Guess what, lady.  Your kid’s problem isn’t the sub.  It’s you.  You’ve gone through this whole process with four other kids, but probably at that time were busy with all of them so didn’t dote on your precious off spring as much.  He’s feckin’ spoiled.  He wants your attention.  If pretending he can’t read will get him more of mommy’s attention?  That’s what he’s going to do.  Sees something amiss in the classroom?  Something different?  Well, then, run at mommy’s knees and she’ll take you home and take care of you.

You’re not helping your son.  You are enabling him to become a selfish brat who teachers will not be able to wait to get rid of.  And mainly because they won’t have you breathing down their every lesson plan.

Apparently, this enabler hit a sore spot today.

What it means to be white

I started temping yesterday at one of those schools you see advertised on TV–get your certificate in Adminitrative Assistance, Carpentry, Nursing Assistance, etc. in a short amount of time.  Will find you a job shortly thereafter.  Change your life, etc. etc.

At least this place doesn’t have the annoying National American University song. 

The interesting part about this job is that the students, and I think exclusively the staff with the exception of the keyboarding instructor and the development director, are all African-American.  This is a situation in which I don’t usually find myself.  I grew up in the sixth whitest suburb in the nation.  I went to college that had a fairly similar diversity demographic.  And foreign study?  Ireland. 

I’m not proud of this by any means.  But it just kind of happened that way.

I answered the phone yesterday at one point and the guy on the other end of the line said, “What you sounded so professional for?  You tryin’ to be white or something?”

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of that comment.  Especially when he went on, after establishing the fact that he was talking to “some white woman”, that he was trying to get a job reference from the school. 

I would have laughed it off, except I had nearly the same conversation three more times on the phone. 

The topic of isms of any kind and being members of a minority group is something I think about a lot.  And I go back and forth on whether or not it’s a good thing to be part of a minority that doesn’t have a visually apparent difference (well, that’s not entirely true.  I look pretty gay most of the time). 

But, if I so choose, I can hide that difference.  Play the pronoun game, choose not to reveal it.  Does it let me assimilate into society that would otherwise be prone to reject me?  Of course it does.  It sure worked at Concordia.  Works at church, too.

But there’s a drawback to it as well.  It’s hard to foster community, fight for rights, when you can hide as part of the majority.  It’s one of the reasons I think the gay rights movement is so far behind the other civil rights groups.  And it’s the reason why there is a latent fear about homosexuality–because you don’t know where we are.  We’re like spies.  Or vending machine camouflage. 

I wonder what someone would say to me if I answered the phone “gay”.  I don’t even know I’m sure what that would sound like. 

How did Kafka do it?

I’ve been temping at a university in Minneapolis in their Disability Services department for the past couple of weeks.  My inner conservative (who somehow peacefully exists with my inner gay man.  They’re good friends but sometimes they find themselves at odds) is having fiscal moral issues with this job.  Since the school is publicly funded, state / taxpayer’s money is going to the institution.  I’m all for publicly funded higher education, don’t get me wrong.  And I think that everyone should have the opportunity to study what they’re passionate about.

But I do have a problem that they’ve got six full-time temps, plus allocating all of their student worker hours, plus their regular employees when not busy with other projects, working on document conversion:

1. Vision impaired students bring in all their texts for the semester.
2. All of the textbooks are then scanned.
3. The scans are saved in a file, then uploaded into an ocular recognition program.
4. Someone goes through and “zones” each page: putting text boxes around all of the text sections, erasing the graphics.
5. Once the document is zoned and saved, it is then automatically converted into a word document that will be read by the computer reader.  Except, the computer doesn’t recognize hypens, and if there are any blemishes on the page, they won’t translate as words. 
6. Ergo, one must go through each book, page by page, and take out hyphens, look for misread words, and bold / format any headings so the computer reader does it differently.

It’s a tedious process.  Wouldn’t it make more sense for the textbook companies to hire the same number of people to do this job, and then the audio versions could be purchased by the universities, instead of having each school (I’m assuming we’re not the only one that provides this service) take on the fiscal responsibility to serve three students a semester? 

While I was sitting in the midst of Population Geography yesterday, an email came through my inbox with the link to the New York Times article about my group’s performance last weekend.  And it was good. 

The New  York Times.  Thought we were utterly brilliant.  And the day the article was published, I was sitting on my ass in a cubicle surrounded by other temps and student workers, typing sentences such as “migration has a different impact than fertility or mortality on population geography.”

Well, no shit. 

Kafka was a bank worker his whole life, writing in his spare time at night, at home.  How did he reconcile these sides to himself–that creativity and the mundane? 

Each day I’m here, I find it increasingly harder to do so.

Overheard at work today (2)

“It was the enema, I’m telling you!  It wasn’t me it was that cirtic barium solution!”

I didn’t hear the beginning of the conversation.  I didn’t hear the response to that.  But I think there was an eye-roll involved.

People are kind of dumb

I’m working at a medical supply company playing file clerk and putting together mailings.  There are two reasons that the people are not that smart.

1. In order to put this 303 piece mailing together, which consists of three levels of life insurance and long term disability, extended optional coverage, 401(k) information, health flexible spending account information, tshirts and post-its, they gave me no less than nine spreadsheets.  NINE.  On what could have easily been done on one with check boxes to say what to put in each packet.  But I don’t get paid for completion, just the hours I spend, so I don’t care.
2. In addition to Long Term Disability (LTD), some employees also have Short Term Disability.  And the woman just looked at me blankly when I said, “so people can get employer provided STD?”  I thought I was funny.

When I Used to be a Teacher

I worked as a substitute teacher my first two years out of college.  At that time, I really thought I wanted to go into teaching, but I decided to go the impractical route with my degree and use it to further my studies in literature rather than gain any kind of practical degree like education (because, really, who would want to take The Ecology of the Educational Setting when they could be taking The Sign of the Native in Literature before 1800?).  All it takes in Minnesota to get your substitute teaching license is a B.A. and completion of a three day workshop.  Sign me up! I subbed in the district I grew up in, often taking over the classrooms for the teachers I had had at school.  And that was…weird.  Probably not the best decision I ever made.  Some of the students were younger brothers and sisters of my friends.  Some where friends of my younger sister.  And sometimes, I had my sister in class.  While the experience on a whole ranged from the awesome days (any time I found myself in 11th or 12th grade advanced English classes–or 3rd grade) to horrid (there’s a show to be written about the six weeks I took over 9th grade chemistry–a subject I think I got a D in), there was one group of students that made my days so easy and awesome, and that I will always remember.  They were all the 11th grade “smart kids”–the ones in the honors English classes, the ones who were from across the spectrum of popularity but had realized that they were a year away from applying to colleges, and here was their chance to shine.  And even though I was just a 22-year old sub in orange high tops, they shone brightly and tried their hardest even for me.  During the second semester when I realized they no longer had a creative writing club, the kids convinced me to start one for them.  So I did.  40 of ’em showed up.  And while some weeks a lot came, other days the numbers dwindled, but it was all right.  If I remember correctly we kept that going for a couple years, until they all graduated themselves.  I remember the kids anxiously turning in their stories for the week, workshopping each other’s words, and the lightbulbs turning on when they would grasp ahold of the truth that anyone can write.  And everyone has stories that are worth telling.  A few of them had me write their college recommendation letters.  Of the ones I wrote, one of the kids went to Harvard.  Another to the University of Chicago.  A couple to Notre Dame.  Some I’ve lost track of.  Actually, I’ve lost track of all of them.  Until today. Because one of them went to Uganda. Katherine Roubos was a favorite of mine.  She was one who walked completley to her own tune, yet still managed to have the respect of everyone–both staff and student alike, in the school.  A gifted writer with a passion for dance (if I remember correctly she was a student teacher at Zenon Dance Studio), who worked at the co-op grocery store near my parents’ house.  She was totally excited about Stanford.  She thought–and I agreed–that she’d fit in and do really well there.  I hadn’t heard a word about her until today when I read her name at the center of the Uganda uprising over gay rights.  Actually, not even rights, per se, but about holding their first ever conference in that country, despite the fact they needed to keep their identities hidden by wearing masks. I don’t know anything about Katherine’s preferences one way or the other.  I haven’t heard anything from or about her since she left high school.  But now, she’s 22.  A college graduate.  A journalist in Africa.  With angry mobs holding signs with her name on them as a “homo propagander” calling for her deportation from a country simply for doing her job.  She calls home to tell her mom that she’s safe and not to worry, that she’s been in touch with the U.S. Embassy and that makes her feel more secure.  Just for doing her job. When I was her age, I had just graduated college.  Took a job as a sub in my old district because it was easy.  On my first day, I stood in front of a classroom in a black suit from Benetton and orange high tops and managed to teach the prologue from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Katherine’s class.  People ask why I stopped teaching.  Simply put, I had a passion for the subject matter (well, when I was actually teaching English classes) that the majority of my students didn’t share.  And coming home at the end of the day knowing that I had failed in creating that same passion for the books in my students was too much. Maybe, on a whole, I didn’t have a passion for teaching.  I liked being the learner, sitting on the other side of the desk, soaking it all in instead of putting it all out there for someone to take in.  I’m selfish like that. But I did love that writing class.  And as much as I have spent today worried for Katherine’s safety, I’m feckin’ proud of her.  I know I had nothing to do with it, and for that reason have no right to take pride in the amazing, brave, and talented young woman it sounds she has become, but I can’t help it.  I hope this uprising has a peaceful ending. And I hope she gets a book deal out of it.  Because that’s a story I want to read.