PTA: Parent, Teacher, Asshole

Let Me Dust This Place Off...

It's been, practically, a month since I posted here. I can't remember what I talked about, and I could, of course, check, but I figure after a month, I don't need to worry about what I said last. I've just been very busy. I find that I'm taking on more and more responsibilities and I don't seem to have very much free time. I've never been very good at posting during the school year, when all the good stuff happens, but this just seems excessive, especially since I was posting regularly there for a little while.

Things to talk about...

I'm the school's new news coordinator. That means I contact newspaper and television reporters when there's something going on at school which they may find newsworthy. I've written my first press release about our SRO teaching anti-gang and defensive driving courses. Two separate classes, of course. I was very nervous and sent my press release to be critiqued by the district news...chief. I don't know what her title is, honestly. She said it was a perfect press release, especially for a first time. I have no idea if the reporter is going to do a news story on our SRO, but I'm hoping. It's good human interest, if you ask me.

I'm the news coordinator for the school because I've taken on a creative writing/journalism class. I'm focusing on creative writing by looking first analyzing excellent examples of literature and then taking the concepts used and trying to apply them to the students' own writings. As the news chief tells me, creative writing and journalism are opposite ends of the writing spectrum as she says in journalism you don't want flowery adjectives, although I've read articles where the opening is very descriptive with figurative language. I don't know squat about journalism and have been looking for something to assist. We have one copy of a journalism text which was printed in 1994. Oddly enough, I found out that's the same standard journalism text across the district, which means out district hasn't adopted new journalism texts in 13 years.............I've ordered myself something from a catelogue. We'll see if I can pull this journalism thing together.

Gang tensions are mounting at school. I know I teach at ARSE (Alternate Reality School for Excellence) and a large portion of our student body are expelled students who often come with gang connections, but gang tensions have never cropped up. Ok, rarely cropped up, and never so blatantly. I hate gangs. I hate gangs because they take children whose parents ignore them or just don't have time to pay much attention because they are working their asses off, they use the violence they help to create, and promise to protect them and guide them. They then beat the shit out of them "to make them strong" and guide them toward activities which greatly limit their future prospects. Those're criminal activities, in case I lost you. So all this is going through my mind and I'm reading the Freedom Writers Diary to my classes...all of my classes...and I'm reminded of the short story The Last Spin by Evan Hunter. It occurred to me while reading the story that the only difference between one gang and the other is that one gang sports one color and values certain symbols, and another gang has a different color and different symbols. In the end, they are all the same except the color the prefer. Possibly due to recent discussions with Ms. Roygbiv, our art teacher, I'm reminded that you shine a light into a prism and you get all kinds of colors...all color comes from the same light. Then I thought, "Is there an anti-gang presentation in this? So now with the help of Bonita the guidance counselor and Mrs. Dorian, our middle school science teacher, I'm trying to create an anti-gang presentation. I'm limited in that I've never done this before and I think my idea is one we can't pull off and it needs to be scaled back, but it could still be effective. I need to convert the story into a play or skit or whatever. We'll see what develops...

I need to piece together the history of my school because I've been there longer than anyone save for the custodian.

I still have no classroom computer.

I drive my son to school every morning to varying degrees of effectiveness from the teachers on hand to unload students.

I'm on the Faculty Urges Communication Krew (FUCK) made up of this year's and last year's teachers of the year to communicate to the superintendent what the other teachers think of how things are going.

This week I'm starting a class in order to get recertification credit, because being a teacher alone doesn't recertify myself and I have so much time to spare that 3 hours once a week is nothing to me.

That covers most everything. I'll try and be by more often. I could go into greater detail with everything and probably put some humor into it, but humor is a time waster and I have little to spare...see you next time.

posted by Bodog @ 6:00 PM