An academic meat grinder

As WordPress continues to recycle old prompts, I pulled another prompt from The Coffee Monsterz Co to respond to today

What is a small (or big) win you had this week?

My biggest win this week was just getting through my workday on Thursday.

Wednesday, my school district with professional development, which means we had no students because us teachers were in meetings. One of my coworkers tripped and fell on a curb and ended up messing up her knee. Incidentally, I also share my classroom with this teacher in question. It’s not a small classroom or anything. In fact, it’s one giant room we’re essentially a dividing wall between the two classrooms was taken out at some point.

Double duty

I walked into work on Thursday to find out that my “roomate” would be out Thursday and Friday. They had a substitute teacher in the room to cover for her, but he got called out to cover for another teacher who had also called off. Being short on substitute teachers, the expectation is that I would cover both mine and my “roommate’s” classes. This wasn’t really a big deal as neither of our classes are rather small. In fact, combining, our classes makes roughly about an average class size in our building. My point of contention was that I was going to lose my planning hour, as I would be covering both her planning hour and my planning hour. I was actually wondering at one point if my principal would come in to cover the class for me so that I could still have my planning period during sixth hour. Little did I know this would be the least of our problems for the day.

Fight Night Day

Sometime during second or third hour that day, a flight broke up between two student students down the hall. One is the new student tour building this year. The other is a returning student who I had last year. apparently these two guys had some sort of beef going back to less school year or maybe even earlier.

Returning student walked into the room where new student was. I don’t know if words were said or if they were actually in the same class. But very quickly returning student was on top of new student punching him in the face. The classroom teacher tried to break up the fight, but ended up getting hit in the face, earning himself a cut across his nose in the process.

Throwing a match on gasoline

So apparently, a third student, who am I will call long hair, called returning student’s mom and told him that returning student got into fight, and that new student had a knife, which he didn’t. Of course, when you tell a parent that there’s a situation at school involving a weapon, they immediately assume the building is going into lockdown.

Keep in mind, with all of this happened without my knowledge. The first thing I’ve heard was when my principal got on the PA and said “the school is not on lockdown. We are dealing with a medical situation”

Mass Exodus

Once our students realize that they were police in the building, no matter how contained the situation was, they were completely amped up. They weren’t getting any classwork done. And only wanted to do is talk to each other about what transpired. I get it. And that since they’re only adults. They just want to get the story straight.

Dead in the water

Finally, after all of this excitement, at about 1 PM, the online platform that are students used to complete and their assignments went down for the remainder of the school day. At that point, we were dead in the water. All of my students coursework is self paced, as it is completed in the online platform. At this point, I was just waiting for 2:15 to roll around.

As a school teacher, it’s not unusual to have a large number of coworkers out of the building, or to even be short a few substitute teachers for the day. Likewise, it’s not unusual. I have an altercation between students. These things do happen. Even the fact that our online platform crashed for the day is not out of the ordinary. But I have all three of these funds happen within one day it’s a lot to try and handle. By the end of it, you’re not even trying to have a “productive school day” anymore. You’re just trying to make it till the end of the day. One positive note about having a triple whammy like this is that you know the next day, for the most part, can only be better.

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