Worst. Day. Ever. Period.

WARNING: For those who do not care for foul language, stop reading here. I have a feeling this post will be full of foul language!

So today I had possibly my worst work day ever. I had this funny feeling when I woke up this morning that I should just stay in bed. It turns out I was right. So here, preserved for all eternity, is what happened to me on May 3, 2006.

1. I got to work 5 - 10 minutes later than my normal time. This was planned because I'm tired of having to open the door on L's (The Director, other wise known as Dragon Lady, bitch from hell, etc.) day to do it. The phone was already ringing when I unlocked the door, but I thought it was more important to turn off the alarm than answer the phone. I spent the next half an hour waiting to see if the phone would ring again because one of my colleagues has been sick the past couple of days and I wanted to see if she would come to work today. She did, but only long enough to explain that due to some stress and mental health problems she's dealing with right now, her physical problems are being exacerbated and she doesn't know if/when she'll be able to return to work. Fucking great. I honestly do feel bad for her, but L is not a sympathetic person and wants to move her out of her current teaching job and possibly make her a TOC. That means the new TOC just starting out will take over for her, which means another fucking person I have to train and another fucking change for the students.
2. I waited and waited for the girl who subbed for my colleague the past two days to come in. 9am came and went and she didn't show up. I had to race around to find someone else to cover the class. The assistant director agreed to do it for a few minutes while we got another CA into the room. I had to spend another few minutes trying to figure out what had been taught the past two days so I could tell the new teacher what to teach. Luckily this person has been doing this job for a long time and can very easily and quickly adapt. She was fine for the rest of the day. While I was racing around I asked the receptionists if anyone had checked the messages that morning. They hadn't. They checked. The person who had been subbing for the past two days did indeed call in sick. Great.
3. During my second class of the day, one of my students left the room to join a student from another class in talking to L about a money problem relating to another student that had absolutely fuck all to do with them. L talked to them for close to an hour. WHY? Why did she talk to them for that long about something that was none of their business????!!!! My student missed the entire lesson and came in as I was letting the students finish some reading.
4. During the third class, one of my more problematic students mouthed off to me one to many times and I sent him out of the class with a dictionary to look up the meaning of the word respect. I had him copy the meaning. He managed, during the three minutes it took, to get into a conversation with a new teacher and get completely distracted. He completely missed the point of what I was trying to teach him. Great.
5. Lunch time. One of my less bright students came to the door of the lunchroom twice to get my e-mail address so he could send me some class materials he wanted me to print out. When I opened the e-mail I realized that my student had e-mailed me the completely wrong stuff. Wonderful. Who knows if he's going to have time to send me the right stuff?
6. Last class of the day. I'm thinking "great, only 1.5 hours left to get through before I can relax a bit in front of the computer and lose myself in curriculum work. WRONG! Three of my students were missing from class. One apparently went home sick. Two went to the bank together and were late getting back. When they arrived back they were in the middle of explaining that they ran into a former student who stole the wallet of one girl and they had to chase him down to get it back when two other students got into a swearing match over ?? It VERY quickly escalated and I realized that I had to remove the two students from the room and send them to L to sort out the problem. Here I was, naively believing that L would sort out the problem. As I was getting them to follow me out of the room, one of the boys, a shithead called Zack*, starting laughing at the anger of the other boy, Todd*. I could see it coming, but I wasn't quick enough to step between them and Todd literally kicked Zack in the ass. Well, by this point I'd really had it. I practically dragged them to L's office, explained the situation really briefly, and left them there. I was confident that L would keep them out of class as they had gotten into a physical fight. Nope. L brought Todd back to class a few minutes later and said Zack would follow in a few minutes because he was outside. Yep. Zack was outside fucking SMOKING! I didn't know we allowed that during class time. I'm thinking about taking up smoking now. As soon as Zack returned to the class, I could see by their body language that this problem had not been resolved and that there was going to be a fight. Luckily nothing broke out during class, but I knew at 3pm there'd be trouble. At 3 I asked Zack to stay behind for a few minutes in order to give Todd time to get away. I know that in a fight between the two, Todd would get his ass kicked. I talked to Zack and when I left class I didn't see Todd. I figured Todd had left.
7. I realized that I really needed some fresh air, so I headed to the door to go outside. I didn't even make it to the FUCKING door when I ran across the boy who had apparently gone home sick. He took one look at me and ran to hide in the boy's bathroom. I called him out of the bathroom and stared at him. He had the grace to look really embarrassed. I asked him if he knew why I was mad. He did. I asked him if he had told someone at the front desk that he was going home sick. He had. I took him to talk to that person at the front desk. That person talked to him for a few minutes and came into the staffroom to feed me the same bullshit story the kid fed him. AM I THE ONLY PERSON WHO CAN TELL WHEN A TEENAGER IS LYING??? Why is lying straight to the teacher's face something that the students seem to be allowed to get away with? Then this person casually says "by the way, you know about the fight in the parking lot, right?" Christ. Bloody fucking hell. Yup, you guessed it. Zack and Todd, part two. A few minutes later Todd got a bunch of his friends together and they tried to gang up on Zack. Meanwhile, L had disappeared from the campus on a business-related meeting. She returned shortly after and ended up pulling Zack, Todd and Todd's friends into her office to "get to the bottom of this". I joined them. It was discovered at some point along the way that L had told Zack and Todd during their original meeting during class that it was okay to fight as long as it wasn't inside. Holy fuck woman! Are you a complete idiot??!! Then L goes on to lecture the students about how unsportsmanlike it was to gang up on someone and how unfair it is. Implied message: go ahead and fight as long as it's one on one. She did say a couple of times "no fighting", but what message do you think the students really took away from that? Then it came out that Zack took off his belt to hit Todd with. L told Zack that he shouldn't use his belt because it comes a weapon and he should only fight with weapons when he feels his life is in danger. Fuck yeah! Now when he gets into a fight again all he has to say to L is that he felt his life was in danger. Since he and his friends have L wrapped around their little finger L will probably end up throwing him a parade because he remembered her pearls of wisdom. L couldn't even get the boys to promise not to fight anymore!! She had them promise that the next time they felt like fighting they would go and talk to her first. Yes, because all teenage boys who get upset enough to get into a fight are rational enough to go and find an adult to discuss their feelings with first.

FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I HATE L! I want to strangle her so hard that her little head pops off her little body. I am not a violent person, but I left work today so mad that I probably only narrowly missed having a heart attack. In case you couldn't tell, it makes me really, really mad that L doesn't think about the message she's sending to my students when she tries to discipline them. This over-50 woman, who has had two kids (boys) has no clue that my ESL teenagers routinely lie to her and play her for a fool. She thinks she's doing the right thing, but that makes her the president of fantasyland. No wonder we have problems with the students everyday! She can't even see that she's making the problems worse. This can't continue. It just can't. And I am still left with the question of why, when the two students came back to my class clearly still upset and with issues unresolved, she fucking sent them back to class.



* Names have been changed to protect their identities. This is Canada and in Canada we can't publish the names of youthful offenders due to the stupid Young Offenders Act.