Well that didn’t last very long.

I’m supposed to be at a training– roughly seven hours a day or so, six and a half if you don’t count lunch– every day for the next two weeks. For attending this training I was supposed to receive a thousand dollar stipend. I’ve already taken off day shifts at OtherJob so that I can do this; I was going to behave similarly next week.

After one day of the training, I’m ready to bag the whole thing and say to hell with the thousand dollars. (Okay, $800 or whatever after taxes, since the school corporation is paying us through payroll rather than the university we’re doing the training at.)

My problem: I have a perilously low tolerance for bullshit, and a perilously low tolerance for idiots, and a perilously low tolerance for having my time wasted. This manages to be all three.  It turns out that the prospect of receiving a thousand dollars basically for sitting in a room and being annoyed but making nice for two weeks is not sufficient motivation to allow my time to be wasted. Without getting too far into the details, I was told specifically more than once that this training would not cover material that I have not only taught twice but been trained on twice in two different contexts. Today, I found out that fully one-half of the training is going to be material that is entirely redundant to me. Annoyingly, it’s half of every day, not half of the days, meaning I can’t just go one week, skip the other, and insist on being given $500. I’d have to cut out every day, which seems unnecessarily rude.

The other portion of the day is going to be math stuff, which I have not done in the past, except insofar that I’m, y’know, already pretty good at math. There might be some new tips and tricks in there, I dunno. But I signed up for the training with the promise of new science stuff. Science is where I’m weak; science is where I need to improve my instruction. I’m not saying I’m incapable of becoming a better math teacher; that’s certainly not true. But it’s not the focus of my self-improvement efforts at the moment.

The person doing the math training spent virtually all of her time mumbling to herself and standing in front of what she was doing at the whiteboard. The time when she wasn’t mumbling or blocking our view of what she was doing, she was struggling with the (not terribly complicated) projection technology that the classroom already had in place. I had maybe an hour with her today and it was unbearable; a good part of the morning was taken up with housekeeping stuff for the entire training and, in what proved to be a poor omen, the exact same math and science pre-tests we’d taken when I did what was supposed to be a different training entirely two years ago. Tomorrow she’ll have her full time. I can’t deal with it.

Combine that with someone sitting with me all day who has proven to be an utter moron and, for reasons I won’t go into, doesn’t seem likely to be choosing anyone else to sit with for the next two weeks, and… God, I’ve already got two jobs. Fuck your thousand dollars. I’ll just spend less money this summer.

This is probably stupid, I dunno. But I can’t deal with getting up every day for two weeks during my summer break and putting up with soul-destroying bullshit. Soul-destroying bullshit is what third quarter is for.

(Sidenote: As I said, I’d taken that precise test two years ago. I whiffed on the exact same question I whiffed on two years ago, involving logarithms. It’s about the third time I’ve whiffed on logarithms in the past several years, and I’m tired of forgetting what they are. Maybe the phrase “reverse exponents” will finally stick in my head this time. We’ll see.)