No Progress To Report

It's time for that grand old tradition--progress reports. I'm not even going to touch on the kid that asks why she's failing after you give an itemized list. No, there's other things to address.

For example, there's the fact that the school has each student submit a progress report to each of their teachers to fill out by hand--in triplicate, none the less. That means we have 47 minutes to collect, fill out (with comments) and return 30 progress reports. Does that leave any time to teach? Nope, so I have to stick in a tape to hypnotize, the vidiots. With picture days, picture retake days, class ring meetings, and voting for class paperweight (Why not? There's everything else.) what's one more day of not teaching?

I don't get it. This school district passes a half of a billion bond every Thursday, so why can't they use some of that money for a method that won't steal another day from me for teaching? Do you think that the school district is just sadistic? I guess if they built our desks out of stacks of hundred dollar bills for us to sit at while we filled out the progress reports, then we would have our answer.

Anyway, the reason that I'm writing today--we're about to start the Dark Romantics, so I stuck in a Poe biography. When the tape got to the part where Poe marries his cousin my student says, "That's gay!" Well, no--it's incestuous. Granted that's four syllables and way out of his league, but let's try to be accurate.