distractions

I have been sitting here all day long, working on memos for students who are graduating in May and are applying for their teaching license but are lacking Praxis scores. This is kind of a surprise, since for several years now the secondary students, who are the ones I process, don’t have to pass Praxis to get a license, so I haven’t had to bother with missing scores. I knew that was coming to a screeching halt with the Fall 07 bunch, who are going to have to have it because the university is making it a graduation requirement. I thought this semester would be my last easy one as far as scores go. Of course not! Just found out Monday that the Associate Dean wants us to contact everyone who is missing scores. They don’t have to have them and probably didn’t take the exam, but I still have to contact them and make SURE they didn’t take it before sending their paperwork to the state. If they didn’t take it, I can still send their stuff off. If they did, they need to send me their scores.

No, I don’t know exactly what the point of that is either. Other than making me spend an entire day on memos. And I am so far to the M’s. I’m calling it a day since my printer has just decided to have a breakdown, and I know from past experience that these little fits it throws mean rebooting the computer. Too late in the day for that. But it’s so aggravating. I have to look up each person on our student information system, and if they don’t have scores in the system I have to check the latest printout from Praxis. Because Praxis and our college have communication problems and we tend to NEVER get the scores. So they’ll be on the printout but not on the system. Maybe. Of course this printout is just from the March exams. There are two or three printouts of scores for each month. So I could look up each person on, oh, fifteen different printouts. I actually started to do that, and after looking for one person on fifteen printouts and not finding them, I decided that was insane. I’m checking March, and if they took it some other time and we didn’t get the scores, they can send me a copy.

Even better, since I’ll be sending memos to probably 100 people telling them I don’t have their scores, I’ll be getting 100 frantic phone calls in the next few days. Out of all the ones I’ve done – maybe half – I’ve found scores for 6. Three of those failed. I can tell you right now that the calls will go something like:

Student: "OHMYGOD!! You sent me this thing! I DON’T KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS!!!"

Me: "It probably means I need your Praxis scores. What is checked on the memo?"

Student: "It says I need FORM V and it says I need FORM A and it says I need FORM S and it says I didn’t pay the FEE and I DID pay the fee I remember I paid the fee and I checked my bank account and the check hasn’t been CASHED did you LOSE MY FEE??!?!???!?!??!?!?…"

Me: "Ummmmm…. I don’t think it says that. Which of those things is checked???"

Student: (long silence) "I don’t know what this means!!!!"

At that point I TRY to ask nicely what their name is, and I TRY not to sound as annoyed as I’m feeling, and I go pull their paperwork out. And I look at the copy I kept and I say, NICELY, that it looks to me like all that’s checked is Praxis scores. I’m just missing Praxis scores. Whereupon they will reply,

"OHMYGOD they SAID I didn’t HAVE TO HAVE the Praxis, do you mean I DO HAVE TO HAVE IT what am I going to DO I haven’t TAKEN THE PRAXIS because they SAID I DIDN’T HAVE TO HAVE IT… WAAHHHHH!!!!

They certainly will never figure out the part that says if they want me to send it without the scores, they just need to let me know.

SO, yeah, a whole lot of time wasted and a whole lot of panic generated and I’m really really really not sure what the point of it is.  

And New Person J keeps talking to me because she’s doing something mindless like stuffing envelopes and for some reason she always assumes that if she’s doing something mindless, I must be doing something mindless too, so I can chat. And I need to focus on these memos so I don’t tell them I’m missing the Praxis scores for English when in fact they are PE majors. I hate sharing an office.

And the person who does all the technical stuff for our ten zillion surveys and field experiences tracking databases dropped by.  I really do like her and I don’t mind chatting with her, but she is someone who can not just exchange a few pleasantries and go away. She’s someone who will stand here talking to me for a good half hour about nothing at all. And I LIKE her, but I don’t like all the time she consumes. Especially when she starts telling me in great detail about the stuff they’re doing with the student teaching surveys now and how they’ve made all these changes and what they’ve done and how it’s different… and I don’t care!!!! It’s not my job any more, and I don’t care!!! Honestly, I didn’t care all that much when it WAS my job, and mostly those stupid surveys just irritated me because everyone was perpetually confused by them and they never made sense at all, least of all to me, but everyone always called me about them. Of course. But I don’t give a flip about those things now!!!

Wow, I sure am whiny today. I should be happy  – Insane Boss is in Costa Rica all week and I haven’t heard the first thing from her, and New Person J will be gone tomorrow and Friday so I’ll have my semi-quiet office back. Internally quiet, at least. But I’m still feeling whiny.

So maybe I should get out of here. Our power did come back on before we got home from work Tuesday, so that was good. And didn’t go back off, despite continued hurricane force winds. I think now they have FINALLY died down. And it’s not freezing. So I’m sure the rain will start. See??? Whiny! Tomorrow the people who are going to do the massive horrendously expensive work on our house are coming out to look at it and give us the bad news as far as how much it will really cost. So that’s depressing. It’s taken forever for them to get back to us about it, and I could kind of forget about it until they resurfaced. Now it’s real again.

But, nobody’s shooting at us.