AFTER-SCHOOL UPDATE

You know you work for CPS when ...
(Professional development day edition)

• The parking lot is half-empty 15 minutes before the day begins.
• In your mailbox is an IMPACT report listing all the days you neglected to input attendance on your trusty CPS-issued laptop computer.
• You remind anyone who will listen that your CPS-issued laptop's monitor burned out months ago.
• You try to get the attendance problems sorted out before the staff meeting, but when you try to log in you get an error message: "The system cannot log you in now because the domain is not available."
• You decide to walk around the building and discover that several of your friends aren't even here. Smart bastards called in sick.
• You finally log into the computer system and discover that you did enter attendance on most dates listed on the report. You hit the "save" button but still get a message saying the attendance is "not submitted."
• As you walk into the student lunchroom for the staff meeting, a counselor asks you when you're planning to submit assignments for a homebound student.
• When you inform the counselor that you personally handed the assignments to her two days ago, she looks at you like she's never seen you before in her life.
• The counselor then calls over to another teacher, "Excuse me, Ms. D." That teacher is not Ms. D. In fact, that teacher and Ms. D. aren't even in the same department.
• The principal takes the microphone and makes some joke about it being the first day of spring. Nobody laughs.
  
• The principal encourages the teachers to please try to pass more students and informs us that our current graduation rate is something like 50 percent.
• A couple of teachers sitting next to you chat away during the entire meeting.
• When you ask one of them to keep it down, he gives you the finger.
  
• Following another attempt at humor and good cheer, the principal announces that, because of the lower projected enrollment, eight teaching positions will be closed next year.
• Which means that almost 40 positions will have been lost in the last three years.
• The talking teachers finally shut up.
• Someone asks the assistant principal about a recent code red. Very little information is shared. It wasn't a drill. But it wasn't real, either.
  
• Following the meeting, teachers meet with their departments, where they are told about everything lesson plans will now have to include: a technology component, special ed modifications, something about GOING GREEN, a service learning component, as well as daily objectives and whatever else.
• At said meeting, teachers break into groups to design common assessments for the remainder of the year, as well as the entire curriculum for next year.
• In your group, one teacher spends the entire time talking about individual students, about who is and isn't wonderful, and you contemplate jumping out the window.
• You cannot think of a single reason not to jump. Instead, you gather your materials and sneak out of the room, head up to the computer lab, where you spend the next two hours re-entering attendance for the dates you supposedly missed.
  
• The Internet connection crawls.
• Life crawls.