Some Impressions...

It's no way to run a business - but I finally got a return call from my boss after a week of trying only by putting a sarcastic subject line on my email.

I had a lovely time playing medieval this weekend. I had some amazing conversations with people, particularly about kids. These are folks I would never have expected to have such a conversation with, ever at the time I met them.

Strangely my husband not only spent all of Saturday on duty, on Sunday he and the boy went to the movies while I stayed home. I think I'll have to start searching for the pod anytime now...

Today I visited my son's class for American Education Week. He wanted me to come for math so I took a long lunch and did just that. I now know what's wrong with the math achievement of our youth. The teacher: 1) put regrouping addition problems on the board and was going to show the kids how to check their work by subtracting - but hasn't taught them subtraction regrouping yet. She went through a bit of rigamarole and changing things before realizing this and abandoning the effort confusing the kids in the process. 2) Of the 4 problems she put on the board, she solved the last one incorrectly and never fixed it. 3) She's been teaching a while and it shows, she pulled some saved materials out to use but obviously never looked at them ahead of time. They were instructions to measure a series of items, some of which weren't in the classroom. I could understand it if this were a fancy prepared overhead slide, but it was marker on acetate. She changed it on the fly, but why not ahead of time? 4) She had to ask one of the kids if they had already done the paper she pulled out for homework. She couldn't remember. 5) She did a fun measuring exercise with the kids, but never really paid attention to how they were doing. Some of them were pretty darn vague on the measuring process too. It was kind of scary.

Just when I start to think my office can suffer no more indiginities, they are sending one of our techs to the ops center to do phone stuff (to make him happy, they told me ?! so I asked - he said "happy?, it didn't sound like I really had any choice."). They are bringing up a tech from the ops center to "keep an eye on things up here for us and let us know what you really need". Yes the boss really told me that - the jerk! Guess they can't believe anything the team that's been here for the last 5 years says.

To accomplish this they are sending up a 24 or 25 year old with a high school diploma and 6 or 7 years experience at our bank ops center. His work for the AVB is his only job ever. He will be "in charge of" mostly people older, more educated and with more and more varied experienced. The only thing they don't have that he has is that he worked there at ops. He's also a worthless little punk, which I know from knowing his mother. Great.

Today my half hour commute home took over 2 1/4 hours. There was some jackknifed tractor trailer on the road. It got dark while I sat there in the car and I noticed what could only be news helicopters circling over the accident site. There were 4 or 5 of them and they looked for all the world like a group of modern mechanical vultures scanning the carnage for tidbits to devour.

So that's what I've been up too. TTFN.