I have always said that teachers are the most generous people on the face of the earth. They share everything. The teachers I work with now are so wonderful. They constantly have my back and are very graciously helping me through my first year at my new school.
I may, however, have found the exception to the rule. A couple of days ago, I was basking in the luxury of sleeping in because I had a rare snow day. I awoke to the sound of my phone dinging with a text on my nightstand. It was 7:30 a.m. I sat up to get it thinking it might be my husband, who wasn’t in bed, or it might be my son away at college needing something.
To my great surprise, it was the teacher who used to be my grade level leader at my previous school. Really? She texts now at 7:30 a.m. when I haven’t heard from any of them since I left? Particularly this teacher. She has a habit of using people. She calls it “delegating.” If you are of use to her, she pretends to be nice, but God help you if you say “no” to her for any reason, and I’d had good reasons on one occasion and had paid the price many times over.
When I announced that I was leaving, the first question out of this woman’s mouth was whether I was going to leave the hours and hours worth of reading lesson plans I had written on the Google drive. (The lesson plans that the rest of the team was supposed to help write throughout the year but never did. The lesson plans upon which they were completely dependent and without which they would have been lost and in trouble. The lesson plans that none of the rest of them wanted the burden of having to write themselves.) The other team members protested that that was not a nice thing to ask me, but she justified her question by saying other teachers wouldn’t. Yeah, like her. She would be that petty. She declared she had seen it happen, and that she just wanted to know. No, I reassured her, I had no intentions of deleting my plans from the drive. I would leave them for their use.
Now, she wanted to know where I had gotten the vocabulary tests I had given to the team the previous couple of years to use with their classes. I told her I had created them myself. She then wanted to know if I could send them copies. I wasn’t really sure if I had saved them on the hard drive on my desktop computer at home or on a jump drive that was buried among the cardboard moving boxes still unpacked in my garage, and I told her so, but I promised to look. Besides, I was pretty sure I had at least left paper copies, if not even digital copies, of those tests with the team before I relocated last year. I got out of bed and started to do some digging around on my computer, and within minutes, I had located one of the tests. I immediately sent it to the entire team with greetings and questions about how their year was going.
Do you know, it’s been over a week now and not one of the six team members wrote back anything? No “got it,” no “thank you,” no “Hi, how are you doing,” no “It’s good to hear from you,” no nothing. I will not be sending anything else except a grateful prayer to heaven that I do not work with them anymore.