AAAAARRRRGGGGGHH

I had a couple new blog posts in mind to write up this week.  I didn't get to one yesterday as the day rapidly filled up on me.  Today, those plans are being put aside because I'm so pissed off I have to vomit it out onto my blog or it will surely poison me from within.

WARNING: I usually refrain from using much profanity on this blog (has there been any?) as I don't know who my audience is and it's not ordinarily necessary.  Today it is.  I will be using a few words not appropriate for the tenderhearted.  It makes the point that I am as furious as I am. If you don't want to suffer through it, then wait for tomorrow's post.


Now back to my previously initiated RAGE.

My teaching "partner" is an absolute fuckwit. FUCKWIT!! I have had a bit of a whine about him before but I've been pushed the point of no return. A quick bio.  He's British, 40ish, looks like an evil rat when he smiles which is rarely, he eats like a starving street dog swallowing food nearly whole and dropping bits around, he's married to a limp, drab Indonesian woman.  He's is as fucking lazy as it humanly possible unless it's an activity of his choosing. Conversation with him is always work and he never knows when to stop talking if it's a topic he enjoys. I've wondered if he falls somewhere on the autism spectrum as he is socially inappropriate or oblivious, alternately. He loves looking up crime reports in online newsites, cackles at pictures of rapists and murderers but is generally devoid of an appropriate response for office chatter. To put it in his own language, he's a cunt.

He started working here about a year before I did, and he's several years my senior. This complicated by the fact that I do everything to prepare for grade four and regularly have to ask him to do something. Anything.  For example, last week I asked him to prepare three assessments; reading, speaking and listening. It's nearly year's end for us and we've got some time to get extra assessments in.  Last week he accomplished nothing towards their completion.  I also reminded him twice that he needs to put his scores in the computer so I can start to work on the overall reports. I did them entirely by myself last year after working here only five months. He's either useless on the computer or plays it that ways effectively enough that I know it would take twice as long to do it with his help. This week I asked him again on Monday to update his student scores and make up an assessment.  As of 2:15pm on Tuesday I've made an assessment, he's taken a nap.  My scores were entered after each test or two.  He's got five tests that are missing. It might be nice if I could get started on overall reports early but he's making that impossible.

I've done everything this year and last.  I was the one who put together the SOSE book.  We get to actually assemble our own science material.  It was more work than usual since last years was written by someone else who made the material boring, too difficult and uninteresting.  I went through and remade the entire book so now it's mostly activities.  Not only did it plan the whole year out in advance, it means we, I mean I, am not making copies every day. I have made or copied sixteen of the seventeen tests we've had so far this year. He made one, and only after I pestered him for a week to do it.

He's looked pretty good on the whole as he's ridden my coattails.  He doesn't belong as a primary teacher.  Today he was meant to start some water videos as intro to our new unit.  I've got a couple by Bill Nye the Science Guy.  I walked in to this video:

Watch two minutes and you'll be snoring at your desk. Jump to the 1:55 mark.  That's where I walked in. These kids are ten and elven years old.  They are also non-native English speakers to boot.  Do you think they're going to follow any of it?  They were all talking and not paying attention. In contrast this was my video:

I've used Bill Nye before in class.  I adore Bill and not just because the show was made in Seattle.  He's level correct, there are lots of short segments and pictures to help explain the concept.  The kids all sang along with the theme song. I followed it with a couple more clips and then a song by They Might Be Giants with even simpler language about states of matter (solid, liquid, gas).

To boot, he teaches one class less than I do.  He only has to deal with this attrocious grade 6 class twice a week for English while I've got them three times a week for science.  To give you a basis for how bad this class is, I said two weeks ago I'd rather sit and hit yself in the head with a hammer for 80 minutes than teach them.  That bad.

For some reason, he also hasn't been required to do a CA.  It's a form of extra-cirricular class for grades 5 and 6, usually athletic.  It runs Thursday 12:50-2:20, no little chunk of time there.  AND YET I'm doing all the real work.  I joked to a sympathetic coworker last week that he still manages to nap three days a week, which is true.  On the sofa in the teachers room.  This coworker told me he actually naps every day but the other two are when I'm in class and he's not.

He's going to continue to skate through since, being the nice person that I am who's more worried about the kids education than screwing him over in a fit of revenge, I left all the materials on the school database. There may be one little schadenfreude moment in all this at least.  It provides small, small comfort.  There is another teacher here that has generally been panned by the staff.  He's a know-it-all and a dick. He never shuts up and knows more about your own family than you do.  Well, he thinks he does.  He started here in January.  He wants to move up to grade four.  He and my current teaching "partner" will kill each other, both get fired or both. Maybe everyone will finally realize what a useless waste of space this asshole is.