plagueville

I don’t think there’s a soul in my office who is not sick. They’re coughing, they’re sneezing, they are running fevers, they are spreading their germs everywhere. I’ve immersed myself in antibacterial hand gel and I’ve been popping garlic and echinacea and vitamin C. However, considering how irritable and whiney and prone to teary fits I am these past two days, I fear my sickness battle is being lost. Great!! Fine!!! Let’s just all come to work sick and continue to spread it around!! And don’t forget to come to the Student Teacher Seminar on Friday and announce to us that you’ve got the flu but you’re there anyhow! Because I sure would hate to NOT get sick myself. Although if I get sick, I’m staying home.

Of course, since everyone else is coming in sick and they’re being real sure to announce how sick they are and how they certainly would have liked to stay home, but they came in because they are just so important and they are just so vital and the world would just quit spinning around if they weren’t in the office spreading their germs to the rest of us, I will feel totally guilty if I DO stay home. This whole mindset of being so important that you have to come in no matter what really gets on my nerves. Especially since …helllloooo!!! They aren’t that important.

ooooOOOOoooo, someone is a little cranky!

She sure is. I’m thinking that if the phone doesn’t stop ringing and people don’t stop coming into this office and New Person J doesn’t stop talking to me for at least ten full seconds, I am going to implode.  AAAAGGHHH!!!  Poor New Person J is going crazy, and I’m trying really really really hard to be patient. And when she can’t find the dates for fall semester on the registrar’s website and can not in fact even find the registrar’s website despite my detailed verbal instructions on how to find the registrar’s website and how to then find the registrar’s dates for fall semester and I finally end up having to get up and go over to her desk and show her step by step how to find the registrar’s site and the registrar’s calendar with the registrar’s dates…. oh, I just want to start shrieking. Except I’m afraid if I start that, I won’t stop.  

To top it all off, I’ve been engaging in a fruitless search for a file that has vanished. It’s a file for a student who graduated in December a year ago. He’s popped up on a report as not having passed the Praxis I. Which everyone has to pass in order to get admitted to Teacher Education and take the restricted classes. The scores on our system are not passing. But he has to have passed. There is certainly a score sheet in his folder with passing scores that never made it over to the registrar’s office and never got put on our system. Because I never would have admitted him without scores.  I hope. SURELY I would never do that. Although when I sent his paperwork to the state for his license, I sent it with the scores on our system. The nonpassing ones. Which DPI didn’t bat an eye at, and now he’s a Highly Qualified teacher. That I can’t explain. Other than I was doing 200 forms for graduates and I was being interrupted approximately fifty times per second, and I typed in the non-passing scores on the system and didn’t even notice they were non-passing.

So of course he has come up on some state report and now it’s a Situation. Along with another student who was non-degree and never took the Praxis I at all, but according to the Associate Dean she should have, even though she started the program six years ago and I could swear and K could also swear that we didn’t require it back then. Assoc. dean swears we did. It’s not listed as a requirement on this one’s program. This one also met with the assoc. dean about ten thousand times and there are notes all over her folder about everything else on earth because she was a big problem child and kept failing things, so I REALLY think that if she did need the test back then, Assoc. Dean would have caught it.   

But WHATEVER. This is very not good and if we can’t come up with some scores at least for the one that SURELY had scores SOMEWHERE, the state will write us up. And whose fault  will that be?? Totally mine! Because I’m the one who admitted him and I’m the one who has apparently lost his file. I keep the graduates files for a year, then I destroy them. Because they aren’t the students’ original files – they are duplicates and just for our use. I do keep important things like their admittance applications, though, and score reports. And this guy’s are not there either. So I’m thinking his file is in fact around here. Somewhere. Since my office is a nightmare of folders and boxes and stacks and piles of stuff that we have nowhere to store, I’m sure I’ll never find it.

Oh, to top it off, K keeps copies of Praxis reports, and naturally there is a chunk missing from those too. I’m sure the chunk that’s missing has his scores. When we were moving desks and file cabinets and cramming another person in here, there is no telling where this stuff ended up. Shredded, probably.

Well, time to go dig some more. In an effort to make this slog worthwhile, I’ll stick in some pictures:

This is one of my favorite old falling-down buildings ever, on top of Tater Hill, not too far from here. Out in the wilderness. Such as it is around here. I think this was an old school building. Yes, that IS snow. This past Sunday.

Also on the oddly named Tater Hill. Baker B and I actually went inside this house YEARS ago – like, before we were married. It had to have been 20 years ago. It looked then pretty much like it does now, and we found a bunch of letters inside. Now I can’t remember what they were about – I just remember they were really interesting. I’ll have to look at old journals and see if I wrote about it. I’m sure I did – it was a really weird thing to run across. There’s another house real near this one now, but I remember it being way off by itself back then.

The Greenway, a few days ago.

A willow tree – where is spring???!!!!!???? They’re always the first to start getting buds.