LAUGH
With the end of every school year comes a level of f*ckery (prob shouldn’t say that, huh?) that makes educators seriously consider relocating overseas. The school day schedule is jam-packed with extra activities and countless interruptions. The weather is warming up which means previously calm children turn into feral cats. But the worst part of the impending end of another school year is when otherwise reasonable, intelligent people lose their senses. When this happens, the cycle of requesting ridiculous things from teachers begins. It looks a little something like this:
1. Truant apparitions (AKA: absent students) suddenly appear, asking what they can do to pass.
Ignoring the established curriculum and months of instruction they’ve missed, they instead request extra credit and watch our heads explode.
2. Administration asks us to create an “action plan” for these same students
Which is admin-speak for: “find a way to pass these kids.”
3. We start honing that edgy teacher style that says, “I really don’t care anymore.”
Our end-of-the-year aesthetic can be summed up as “dry shampoo and caffeine.”
4. Standardized testing is lurking.
The school schedules tests before we can cover all essential content, and we have to skip our favorite lessons to ensure we cover exam material. We die a little inside.
5. Standardized testing is here.
Students are frustrated that the entirety of their academic capability boils down to a bunch of Scantron bubbles. They die a little inside.
6. Standardized testing is over!
But…there’s roughly a month of school left; teachers are expected to teach, students are expected to learn, but we’re honestly just DONE. If we can put a man on the moon, I’m confident we can figure out a way to align testing with the last week of school.
7. Students get wild and antsy.
The weather warms up, effectively turning previously calm children into feral cats.
8. We want to take a personal day, but there are no subs.
There aren’t enough subs because despite all of us feeling burned out, only some teachers take off every Friday, leaving the rest of us to cover their classes. It’s fine. Not like we need our plan period or anything…
9. Meetings, meetings, and more meetings!
How else can we sort the data, meet the deadlines, or finalize the grades if we don’t continually meet as a group?! I’m just spit-balling here, but put it an email.
10. We get buried under ceremony after ceremony.
In addition to academically relevant to-dos, every group, club, sport, and organization tries to end the year by adding something. Spare me another ceremony. What if we just set aside one evening where we all got together and clap for each other? Mission accomplished?
11. No one is paying attention anymore.
Literally anything detracts from students’ already waning attention, like that butterfly outside the window, a school-wide announcement about yearbooks, or any movement or sound coming from the hall.
12. The vicious end-of-the-year administration feedback loop begins.
Administration asks for our input on end-of-the-year stuff. They subsequently call a meeting because they dislike our input. At this meeting, the same teachers air the same grievances, the rest of us are forced to listen, and we all lose precious minutes of our lives we’ll never get back.
13. Parents who were unreachable all year now contact us asking if their child is passing.
We bite the inside of our cheek until it bleeds to avoid answering, “WHERE IN THE WORLD HAVE YOU BEEN?”
14. The school asks us to chaperone.
One word: prom.
15. Our classrooms have been transferred to the surface of the sun.
Our classrooms hovers around 90-degrees by mid-morning.
16. We write so many behavior referrals we could wallpaper our classrooms with them.
And we might as well—clearly no one else is doing anything with them.
The end-of-the-year chaos kinda makes us want to remove our fingernails one by one with a rusty butter knife. We take a deep breath and know this, too, shall pass. But until it does, we can commiserate with our Bored Teachers community!
