I may have made somewhat of a tactical error.

I’ve been actively working to increase my leadership role in my building this year after several years of stepping back from any kind of after-school or committee obligations. I’ve had my weird little gay nerd club and that’s been about it. This year I’ve joined a couple of building committees and I’m chairing another one (this one, excitingly, is actually a paid position) and I’m also starting a Math tutoring group next week.

Hey, have I mentioned that my teaching partner is on indefinite leave? As in, they might be back next week and they might not be back at all, haha don’t bother making any long-term plans about anything because who the hell knows? Because that’s happened, leaving more or less exactly half of our 8th grade students without a math teacher. They’re still writing lesson plans and (presumably?) grading assignments, but … well, I don’t know if you’ve ever written lesson plans before, but writing lesson plans for subs for more than about three days in a row is actually impossible. Not in the sense that you can’t write them, because of course you can, but everyone involved recognizes that you are actively hallucinating if you think that whatever is going to actually happen in your classroom has any real chance of matching whatever you put in your lil’ plans over there. You’re even more doomed if you expect your kids to learn anything while you’re gone, because no one is going to teach them– a shockingly (and yet, not surprisingly) high number of middle school teachers cannot actually manage eighth grade math, much less Algebra 1– and they’re not going to be paying any attention to whatever the sub is teaching anyway.

Written directions? Pfah. Witness, from my Canvas for my Math class:

See that third paragraph? For reasons that aren’t interesting, homeroom isn’t meeting tomorrow, and usually Thursday homeroom is Math IXL time. I’m making my kids do it anyway because I am a heartless bastard.

I am predicting that zero of my over-a-hundred 8th graders notice that paragraph. We’ll see if I’m right.

Anyway, point is, you can’t type a document and then expect these kids to use it to learn anything. It is to laugh. Na Ga Ha Pen.

I emailed all of the kids in my partner’s Algebra class this evening to let them know about the tutoring sessions. We’ll see if I have a roomful of kids I don’t know panicking about their grades on Tuesday afternoon.