Ten days…
As the title suggests, I go back to work in ten days-the twelfth we'll be putting our room back together and getting our system re-hammered out, thirteenth is the seventh and eighth graders' first day and then the fourteenth the rest of the grades (ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth) come back, and with them I imagine the rest of the crew (though I imagine my kid'll probably be back on the thirteenth :/ ).
I'm so not looking forward to this school year.
A little background because I surprisingly never went into depth about this past school year: In December or January, I don't remember, the teacher, Kramer, hired a kid who had graduated the year before to be an aide because we were shorthanded. Okay great. Then he hired two more kids who graduated in that same class for the same thing. So with them, myself and two other aides, we were, for once, fully staffed. It was fabulous.
At first. Then the problems started. The three kids he hired were all buddy-buddy with Kramer and he most certainly favored them. (I took to calling them the Golden Trio.) The girl missed so much work-no-call, no-show-multiple times in months and not a word was said to her. At one point she flaked for like a week straight and when she did show up, she was whining to me about how she felt like crap. Bug mistake, as I had gotten only a few hours of sleep the night before and had a sore throat and still managed to drag my ass into work. She then proceeded to move to Anchorage without so much as a warning, so thanks a fucking lot.
The other two, the boys, stuck around, but it was laughable. They were assigned to one kid-yeah, two aides to one kid, even if he was a raging handful. Part of this kid's IEP was taking him on car rides to get him to calm the fuck down, which never worked and was a joke, and they would do that, and be gone for hours at a go. Like when they took him home, they'd be gone for an hour. I went on a ride to take him home and it took 30 minutes to get him from the school and to his house and for me and Kramer to come back. They were doing something, and I'd hear through the grapevine (my other, decent coworkers, Heather and Emily) that people would see the van they used to drive him around outside houses where people would like sell or do drugs or whatever. Yeah, that's promising.
On top of all that, they barely ever did anything and bullshitted around on the computer used for their kid's behavior reports, and nothing was ever said to them, but Heather and Emily and I were expected to do our jobs and be with our students and if we even attempted that, we'd be bitched at. And then, like three days before the end of the year, one of the boys had to leave with the cops because apparently, there was a warrant out for his arrest. We haven’t seen hide or hair of him since, so I doubt he'll be back this year. The last one is just a lazy fuck and on the very last workday we had, when we were supposed to be making summer school supplies for our students, he was whining and bitching about something or other, and when Heather told him he didn't have to be there, he up and fucking left. I sincerely doubt he'll be back this year, because Kramer's left and I think he knows he won't be able to get away with any of the shit he was under Kramer's protection.
I'm so grateful Kramer's left because toward the end of the year I was ready to fucking strangle him. (I skipped Special Olympics this year because I couldn't stand to be in the building longer than I had to, when I would wouldn't get any pay, or even thanks for helping so much like I did last year.) I'm still dreading the coming year, though. I've met his replacement-she taught in some village before and came in to visit once or twice-and she seems like a nice woman, but honestly, unless she's like fucking Jesus herself, I'm probably going to fucking quit by the time semester break rolls around.
I'm just fucking sick of dealing with fucking dipshit coworkers (Emily and Heather are awesome, we kind of forged a sort of friendship / alliance together when it was literally us against them) and being shit on the kids. Two psychopaths and someone who thinks I'm a fucking punching bag from mid August to late May with only a month in the middle and some little breaks in between will make me fucking flip. Really, all I am is an over-glorified babysitter. I know nothing I do, or anything else any of us will do, is going to ~*~*~change the children's lives~*~*~. I'd give my left fucking arm for a job where I'm not a babysitter and I can get treated like a human being every so often, y'know?