Monday, September 8, 2008


Day three of Actual Time In The Classroom (not sitting in training meetings or visiting colleges) and the to-do lists are starting to look pathetic.




By noon we're struggling to stretch our last few activities into hour-long ordeals and surfing the College Board and ACT websites for New And Exciting Information for Students that we didn't know we needed to know.




There is a cricket living in the far corner of our office here at Fleming and the melancholy call of an insect who has come inside at the first brush with fall to die here in the warmth is the ideal soundtrack to our activities. That sentence is in desperate need of more punctuation but the depths of my despair are such that I cannot even think about semicolons or commas right now; the writing, it must flow from my despairing fingers! (That semicolon was okay because it was an organic semicolon, not one imposed after the fact. That semicolon was okay, because I am fickle with my punctuation - like I am fickle with my use of the word "despair.")




We want to be productive. We want to be helpful. We want to do this job about which we are so excited. We are, however, but two young women - we can create but so many tasks for ourselves before we're finally allowed to meet students and speak in classrooms and actually talk to our advisers. I know that the beginning of the school year is incredibly stressful for the heads of guidance - it seems like every third student needs his or her schedule changed - but it's also stressful for us if we can't do anything because everyone else is too busy.




Some day...some day we'll have a real job with students and everything.




In the mean time...we wait. We take online assessment tests we will (hypothetically) one day offer to our students. We learn that when we're paid, it's going to be a very small sum and sent to our schools where no one knows who we are or that we have post boxes.




Our cricket chimes in with the sounds of a Spanish I class being taught down the hall. The bell rings so loudly we jump involuntarily. The school day goes on, despite us.




Here's some clip art!






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