I feel like complaining about my job

[marmal8]

...and what better place to do it!

1. I'm bored. Way back 100 million years ago, my teacher housemates, they said to me, complaining of boredom in my office job, "teaching is never boring." Teaching in brick & mortar was a lot of things (stressful, annoying, time-consuming, heartbreaking, joyful, hilarious, exhilarating) but it was never boring. Even delivering the same lesson 3 times a day was not boring, because it was different with each different group of students. I dreaded grading papers then as I do now; I dreaded calling students' homes then as I do now. The thing is, that's most of what I do now.
2. Communicating by email is difficult. It's so much easier to just put a question to a kid "Well, what do you think that question means?" and sit and wait (for days if needed) for them to answer. I let the students choose their medium of communication (it's not always the right choice) and email is the worst. If I ask 3 questions only one of them is going to get answered. A student can hide behind "I don't get it" very easily as I try to puzzle out what they don't get. Today I'm dealing with this high-maintenance kid who thinks of herself as an A student (and maybe she was at one time, in a different environment, before she had a baby) but for some reason doesn't understand the very clear questions on the assignment. I could just rephrase them for her, but my feeling is that A students can do that on their own. I also think she hasn't read the book because she's been complaining about how busy she is and that she doesn't have time to read. (We supplied recordings of most of the chapters. I also suggested she could read to the baby or listen to the recordings with the baby because duh, reading is good for babies.)
3. The evils of charter schools are many. This includes lack of clearly defined job responsibilities (read: getting a lot of random extra job responsibilities that keep me from doing the teaching part of my job and are, in fact, a nuisance), and lack of tenure. It is MAY TWENTY-SIXTH people and I have not been offered a position for next year nor told to take a hike. I cannot afford to sit on my ass about this, so I am starting up applications.

About the only thing I like is not having to dress up, drive somewhere, and stay in a building all day.
Sometimes I fall asleep during work. This might be one of those days, because I really do not feel like making calls.