my reflection on Kat's criticism
Kat,
I've spent time rerflecting on what you told me. Some points you were correct on, such as undermining you with Caleb when I told him that half the pretzels were for me. I think you were off base on many of the things you said about me tonight. You are actually micromanaging my teaching style. Letting the kids walk all over me does not affect you as a teacher, the kids know that I can be a pushover and that you mean business. That is why I started emulating the way you counted and handled the children. I do think you have gotten too mean with the children and now care more about their immediate behavior and not their long term needs. What you don't know about Theodore today is that he was ready to come with me to the door and practice asking and walking in nicely. He basically asked me if he could go pea as he was holding his crotch, with his legs crossed. For a boy that has a history of wetting himself, I chose to error on the side of letting him go to the bathroom.
I'm want you to know that what I say in the rest of this letter is not because I am defensive about what you said. The same way you were willing to take your time today to tell me those things because you care about me, I wanted to let you know before you do what I did at Head Start and go off on the deep end and push people away. I was grossly innapropriate dealing with the Head Start staff that last week of the ECE classes. Granted they were acting like spoiled children, but the way I handled it was wrong. I don't want you to do the same thing I did with the Head Start staff. It took me this long to mend those relationships, especially wth Penny Reaume.
You have been steadily more grumpy, strict, and needing to be right. The only reason I haven't responded to your reaction regarding procare last week is because I know your stressed and I don't want to add more stress to you right now, but I totally disagree with your responses to my inquiries,cocerns and being miffed that no one thought to ask me, the procare expert of the building (remember I had to learn the software well enough to train others, learn the programming language of procare so we could manually program the billing methods).
I won't even get into it with you about not following the data entry conventions I established. Those naming conventions were done that way for a reason. One major reason is so that converting to version 10 would be as seamless as possible so we wouldn't have to edit the data for conversion. The ID code and Account key standards were established by me so that way data would be better organized since the software isn't as well organized.
What you don't know is that Child Care had actually tried using procare before I set it up. Steph had actually entered in all the data once. The problem was that she didn't follow any standards and it made retrieval of he data a nightmare. For example, the account key was based off the first child to enroll at childcare and MINOCS were put as ICW as the parents even though the manual said not to. I established those data standards to help prevent things like that from happenig in the future when someone finally replaces you (even though I want you to stay, I have to assume for every position that they could be replaced at any moment and have contigency plans for that).
I was hurt that you thought so little of my knowledge of procare and that I wouldn't have already thought of those plans ahead of time. I had already once used the procare website to see exactly how much it would cost for our specific program (the store does it based on our installatio key) to upgrade to version 10. I also took into account the possibility of upgrading to version 10 when I created the data standards and I knew exactly what data would upgrade or not, and I knew the capabilities of version 10 compared to version 9. And then you told me you believed the word of a salesman over my word and wanted me to provide proof?
What is the purpose of having an IT coordinator whose purpose is to learn the ins and outs of all the software for the building if no one will treat him like an expert regarding the software. The truth is you treated me like Frank does and thought of me as a child doing this on my free time. I am an IT professional with training and experience and I am the IT coordinator of the building, whether I am paid or not right now. I thought I had earned that respect from you and Penny with all the IT things I have done for Child Care and Head Start over the last two years.