5 Sept 2026
I think it's either week three -two with kids-or week 73 of school.
I had to take a sick day to take my mom to the doc. My district's sick days are ridiculous, they calculate how many you earned by the hours you've worked. It's not like previoius districts where they just hand you 12 sick days at the beginning of each year, and you spend them or they roll over. It's crappy.
There is also no bereavement time, so when my dad died after I'd been in the building only two months and I had one day of sick time, that was just too bad for me.
When this country finally burns down--I'll be dead, hopefully killed fighting on the right side of history--there needs to be tiers of sick time, or All The Sick Time and No Punishment. Just take as many paid sick days as you need for your sickness, your mom's Dr appointments, your childrens' illnesses and Dr appointments, your dad's death. Go. We aren't going to punish you for being human.
Our Puritan ancestors were punitive Fuck Twats. Punishment only. No support. So Old Testament.
Allrighty. This Week In High School Theatre.
Reminding all that I am still rebuilding a dark department. I managed a fall play and musical last year, but this fall we're closed for renovation---there's that LSOH song again. So. I'm teaching stagecraft without a stage, and Theatre 1 without...students. Scheduling 650 kids with every option is rough on performing arts. There's a choir with seven kids enrolled. I have five in second period and three in sixth period Theatre 1. If you combine them into one period, I'm no longer full time ---those of you who don't teach can hush up. I'm scraping by because I put up the first musical in several years. I can ride on that until the end of this year.
The Increasingly Annoying Tale Of No Air Conditioning.
I have no theatre (see previous paragraph "renovation", then pause again to sing the song from LSOH), just a classroom on the second floor with no air conditioning. Not just "The district didn't turn on the AC" but literally, the heat register is heat only. It's been 95 almost every day for the last three weeks. My car said 102 when I left the building yesterday. I have ceiling fans, a box fan from home and two oscillating fans I liberated from choir and the dressing room. It's manageable with the windows open in the morning, but I have special needs kids fourth period with heat induced seizures.
It's not manageable for them.
In a building with 650 kids and- I'd be underestimating- at least ten empty classrooms, I cannot explain why it's so difficult to find another classroom for my kids with AC. But it is.
Last week I was in a room half the size of my theatre classroom, that had been untouched since Mr. Kotter quit teaching. They had to repair the AC. But there is no AV, no projector or way to screencast slides, which is what my kids were working on for their "What I Love" presentations. Bonus, I learned through the grapevine from a retired teacher that this room was not used due to aesbestos. Neat. This was the room they landed on after rolling 5 other room number possibilities, apparently none have AC.
So Tuesday I will get the key to yet another third floor room, bigger with a projector, next to the art room. Allegedly with working AC. Unsure of aesbestos status.
We are going into week three with kids and they're still shuffling rooms because apparently, once the AC was turned back on, there is no map of which rooms actually have it.
I've only had one spike with the no cell phone policy, and she fell in line when I pulled the guilt card and told her I was in trouble for her trying to sneak her phone under the table. Guilt still works. Who knew?
No More Folders Or Platforms OR Repeat Copy And Paste BS Please
Ok.
I have LEAP, which is my evaluation platform. I have to create an SLO--which is data tracking---for one class based on the SLO. The class I track must have 10 students regularly attending to count. The SLO is a wordsmithed Student Learning Objective I must create for the year. I am judged on whether I accomplish the SLO. The class must have 10 regularly attending kids to qualify for data tracking. Yes, I said that twice.
I had to track my MI/S (special needs) class last year because they were the only consistent 18 to show up. This year, I don't want to track them, because they are MI/S and do not fit any of the district bandmarks or state theatre standards. They're largely non verbal---I can't track projection growth. I fudged it last year by writing two plays for them to perform in the fall but...the theatre is closed this fall so...the only other possiblity -stagecraft--has 12 in it. They seem to be showing up, but nothing in that class really matches the theatre appendix I was given by the district. So I have to dig up my state standards and copy and paste whatever it says for stagecraft into the SLO document that I have to then attach to the LEAP platform. But first, I cannot figure out how to download my class list of names into the SLO document from IC. There is not a button. I think my STL (evaluator) did it for me last year.
I have to post my emergency sub plans in a schoology page for the building.
I have to take 15 district training modules.
I have to post my assessment dates along with all my arts colleagues, in a document I can never find, buried in a folder I also cannot find. The assements are in my lesson plan slides and documents attached to my slides that I shared with my evaluators. The assessments have already changed three times, as my small class sizes eviscerated my summer planning for the classes, but there are words in the boxes. If they do a walk through and my kids are not doing the assessment they see written in the box, I guess I get...in trouble? Do I get to go home? Can I volunteer as tribute? I will let you know what happens, because I'm drowning in triple check "gotchas", and I will forget to change that specific box to match the altered lesson plan because I've already forgotten where it is.
I have to write my daily classroom procuedures using the language from the appendix in yet another document, also located somewhere. I just copied and pasted from the appendix, which was attached, and could have easily been read by my AP. But I had to take the step to put it in the box because clicking on the attachment was too much for her?
Even though we use "process" and "product" grade vernacular, I have to separate them out as "formative" and "summative" and repost them in other boxes in another document, even though in schoology it's "process" and "product".
ALSO, schoology is where my grades are housed, but I have to push a button for them to passback to IC every night. I get in trouble if I don't do that, and I get in trouble when I ask why the stupid ass district isn't just using IC for everything, like every other district is.
My gradebook is being checked weekly. If I don't have one process grade a week, I get a note. This is Not A Big Deal in theatre, as we perfrom in some capacity every Friday. But dude. You're gonna babysit my gradebook? I've been teaching 24 years, you've been teaching eight years and are the same age as my kid.
I have to write a CLO on the board daily. This was a HUGE mohawk moment last year when I refused. I am IN THE THEATRE, where EXACTLY would you like me to post this bullshit? In protest I pasted a big piece of sticky butcher paper on the proskene wall with a generic CLO, which I was graded down for at every walk through. But now I'm in a classroom ---well, four periods anyway---with an AV cart TV and I can just put up the slide. I still refuse to wordsmith it to their liking, becuase it's stupid, and no CLO is going to change the fact that a kid was placed in class involuntarily and thinks theatre is gay, or didn't eat breakfast, or is going through social media withdrawl.
I have to "internalize" my lesson plans on a document with columns that demand to know if I Did The Thing The Way They Wanted And How It Went. Fuck that. I'm already not doing it.
I have to get on the slide show from the PD day that I missed to take my mom to the doctor and get the document with the three different New Exciting Innovative Approaches To Teaching and choose one to try in class, then fill in the box with what day I'm doing it so they can come watch. Nope.
I promise that is not all of it, that's what I remember.
Legally Blonde
I have to teach stagecraft without a stage, so I leaned into design. Which means watching Broadway productions to attach vocab to The Thing since I can't walk them backstage and point at a flat. So I used Legally Blonde the musical, because these kids have never seen any show, ever, and it's big and splashy and has all the vocab words.
Then, my Theatre 1 classes turned out to be too small to play improv games, and I had to switch plans to a more History and Lit approach. While I did that, I made them watch Legally Blonde and choose a character to track.
Long story short -TOO LATE- I've watched Legally Blonde for two weeks.
I can track every character's journey and relate it to the theme "Overcoming a stereotype". Even Warner, who overcomes nothing and remains a stereotype as the control in this experiment.
I watched it so many times, I started equating Elle's journey with AOC, hearing lines like "They laughed at me like they're laughing at you" and believing for a moment that NOBODY has ever thought of that before.
That moment extends, and I'm looking at the privilaged men attacking women who just want to be lawyers and the show's universal theme is actually a UNIVERSAL THEME and I wave my arms at the kids and ask questions to push them to connections. They're making them, they're just quiet because everything sucks and they're not white so the whole idea of a blonde women being the underdog takes them time to process.
OH, which reminds me, my hispanic male colleague told me his students talk shit about what they're going to do if they see ICE and he said something really powerful that I wish to pass on. He told them "You have to be careful, white people are getting shot protecting you. ICE doesn't care." Friday there was a Colorado school ICE walkout, but I have no idea if any of my kids attended. I think one did, he wasn't in sixth period. I didn't even know about it. Yet teachers are 100% indoctrinating Anti ICE feelings according to many right wing social media trolls.
UGH.
I have said for years it will be the bullshit that makes me quit teaching.
Platforms, more paperwork and forced reflections, forcing me to try your new exciting innovation that DOES NOT FIT IN PERFORMING ARTS but I have to sacrifice a class to try it in front of you, only for you to realize it doesn't work and for you to say you have no ideas about how to make it work, so I just lost a day of instruction for you to not even admit that you have No Idea How To Teach Theatre.
So Leave Me Alone.
Scene.
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