I set the bar pretty low for professional development days, especially the mando ones before school starts. Experience has just taught me that if I don’t expect much, and I remember my laptop to covertly work on classroom prep, then the day tends to be less of a waste of my time and less frustrating all the way around.

I think this year, even if I had laid my fictional bar on the ground, the reality that was my 2 PD days would have found a way to tunnel underground beneath my bar!!

(Disclosure, this is most likely going to be my bitchiest, whiniest blog post to date, but I have concluded that if I don’t rant this out, there just isn’t any hope my BTS mood is going to improve before the bell rings tomorrow! Please excuse any grammar and spelling errors)

How hard is it for admin to look at the list of required staff members they are herding into the meeting room to at least get a head count, and THEN actually make sure there are enough chairs for everyone??!!!

For the third year in a row, we walk into the staff meeting, with pretty tables decorated for each of the grade level teams BUT NOTHING FOR THE SPECIAL ED TEAM!! No table, no chairs, no acknowledgement of our existence. And this year it wasn’t even us neglected. All the specialist (music, science, PE, SLPs, nursing) were left out. We are so use to it that we just start filing towards the back joking among ourselves that we will just be exercising our rights to flexible seating; and, heat rises so it’s cooler on the floor anyway.

After participating in the high energy ice breaker, the grade levels divide up and start talking math curriculum. YAY! Super relevant to those of us in the back row. I flat out asked to be excused this year. I just didn’t have the time or patience to pretend to be interested this year. Plus, I still had not put the finishing touches on my paraprofessional training for the next day.

So let’s fast forward to that. No need to dwell on the many other waste of time activities I was dragged back to interrupting the actual productive time I was having with my SPED team.

Instead of just reading from the page, I made a PowerPoint presentation. I know they are over done and boring, but I added transitions, animations and pictures to try and break up the boring.

MY TITLE SCREEN WASN’T EVEN UP FOR 10 SECONDS BEFORE ONE OF MY PARA’S POPS OFF WITH A COMPLAINT!!!

“I can’t really read that font, can you change it?”

“It’s kind of hard to see, can you make it brighter?”

WTF!!! Put on your glasses, and let me turn off a couple of lights before you open your mouths! STFU!!!

What we do most in a SPED class is give positive praise/reinforcement all day every day! I have to do it for my para’s as much as I have to do it for my students. That said, I wasn’t expecting them to blow sunshine up my ass with compliments/positive reinforcement for the countless hours I spent working on their training and catering it to exactly what they need to be taught/retrained on. BUT I did expect less complaining. That’s my fault. See, set the bar too high. Bar lower then compliments, but higher then complaints was too high.

I also spent a huge amount of time cleaning and reorganizing my classroom to meet the needs of the students I have coming in this year. For instance, I got all new (to me) desks that match. No one has a desk that is a different color, size, shape, better or worse than anyone else.

“I don’t really like it”; “Can we go back to the way it was?”, “I think the desks should be turn around the other way; this way the kids can get into everything in their desks”! The last comment was my favorite of the stupid classroom comments. Well, duh!! How else are they going to get their morning work binders I have spent all summer cutting, laminating, and cutting again, or their IEP work bins if their desks are turned backwards. Not to mention, student desks are not meant to be sat at from the back!

Again, set me bar too high! This time I guess I kind of did expect a compliment, or at least a kind word. A “hey thanks for cleaning up the HUGE mess we made over ESY” would have been greatly appreciated!

Those are my rant highlights! The ones that keep circling in my head. There were many other WTF moments over those 2 days but, hopefully now that those are out, I can get some peace.

Tomorrow starts the first day of instruction. When I left exhausted, feeling defeated and super frustrated on Friday, I left all work there. I promised myself a weekend free of classroom responsibilities and thinking. That of course was also setting the bar to high because I can’t stop thinking about classroom stuff; what needs to be completed; do I need to change my daily schedule; did I plan enough activities; back to school night is this week, do I need a new parent questionaire; look at what that teacher I follow in IG is doing for BTSN, should I do that?

I think it is wine time! Wish me luck tomorrow!!