Saying it to your face

If you want to see me talk about my life as a teacher and amateur performer, check out this school webcast interview here.

Those tire marks on my back? I was thrown under the bus.

Problems continue to mount with Sharon, the DEC teacher who has been working with my team. She claims that she felt overwhelmed and a little on the outside of the group. Instead of saying something to any of us, she complained to our supervisors. This is why our observations have been lower than usual due to inability to co-teach. She even continued to complain after another new teacher was brought onto the team and made herself immediately invaluable, which is what Sharon should have done.

I had tried to give Sharon the benefit of the doubt, to the point of doing part of her job by creating a rewording and simplification of the Canterbury Tales unit I created two years ago. Big mistake. This week, I was accused of creating a faulty rewording for Beowulf, a unit I didn't touch. Sharon kept insisting that she didn't do the work on modifying the text for our Special Ed students, and since I had volunteered to do it before on another unit, I must have on this one. Wow, so not only did Sharon admit that she wasn't doing her job, she blamed me for stepping on her toes and doing so badly. Yeah, I'm a little annoyed. The sad thing is that I could easily fix that faulty modification and make a better one. I won't. I'm done creating items that are Sharon's responsibility while I get negative reviews for being mean to her.

The saddest part of this whole mess was that it came a day after I had spent a half hour on the phone with Sharon, checking in with her, making sure she was comfortable with the team, asking about her sick son, the whole thing. Linda had warned me that Sharon was two-faced, but I believed her almost too late. Thankfully, the rest of the team believes that I wasn't responsible for creating the faulty pages.

Another lesson delivered to the teacher

My writing club had an amazing, fulfilling meeting last week. I'm still pondering how much it affected me and the students involved. One student in particular, also named Cat, shared a personal memoir. The content was painful as she discussed being bullied and how she reacted by... I'll let Young Cat speak for herself:

"I never really thought that one day I would think that suicide was the only way out of all the pain. I had always been the four-eyed freak I got used to it. The when people found out that I was in foster care I became the for eyed foster freak. No one ever really noticed the scare on my face until like fifth or 6th grade when I became scare face. When I was in Middle School, I walked home every day from school and when this one bus would pass me, the one that came up with the name scare face, threw stuff out off the buss window at me. Then in high school, my first year I went to McKinley and things got a lot worse. Then October of 2010 I was hospitalized for the first time. The things were good after that. The when It was getting close to my birthday things got bad again. I over dosed and was sent to the hospital again. Now in 2011 I was hospitalized February, March, and April. Then October 2011 was my last hospitalization. I am proud to say that it had been three months since I cut last. I am so proud of myself. I almost cut in December when my grandma died but I stayed strong and did not cut. I have had a rough past and I am a stronger person and glade for all the people that I have met. It has been a long journey that was tough but now I keep myself sane by my writing. "