Unfiltered Story #394438

I have been teaching for well over thirty years, and have outlasted a good number of administrators and nearly all of my other coworkers- the only ones that have held longer than me are paying divorces and child support. The clientele is fairly entitled, the community being top 10% for the US economically, so certain behaviour issues are common, and commonly swept away by administrators afraid of angry parents.

The law requires a certain level of attendance be met by the students unless there is a valid medical excuse, and this is tracked, as everything else is, by a centralized software suite. One element is tardiness, and we must record tardy students. Every time. And will be reprimanded if it is not done. When a student reached a set number of events, the system sends an email to the teacher. This is where it gets interesting. The teacher is responsible for informing the administrator so action can be taken. Why is this interesting, you ask? If the teacher doesn’t, the administration will give a formal reprimand to the teacher.

By November, the number of students I had over the limit was significant, and I had filed all of the appropriate paperwork, but the admin took no action, and the issues continued. Ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty tardies for several students, not by seconds, but five or ten minutes, disrupting the class each and every time. Eventually, I stopped bothering to do the paperwork, as no followup was done with the students.

The obvious next step was a reprimand for me, for not doing the paperwork. In the meeting, when I was asked why I wasn’t, I said that it was because admin wasn’t doing followup and the behaviours never changed. The admin than said that if I wasn’t doing the paperwork, how is he to know?

That was when my labour rep asked “So why are we here?”