Tournament of Bozos

Had to go back to PISD today. I'm more lugubrious than ever. Tomorrow the kids are back. God help me.

Here are the highlights from today so that you may bask in my misery:

• Faculty meeting at 7 in the school cafeteria, complete with stale bagels and fat free cream cheese.
• Coffee at said meeting served in bathroom gargling cups, you know what I mean?
• 10 minutes of "praises and prayer requests," which boils down to 10 minutes of people saying they are pregnant (that goes under praises, though I would put it under the latter). I quit drinking the coffee, in case the water is contaminated.
• Line of the day: "The TAKS test is like the Rose Bowl of the high school world. It's important that we get our kids as prepared as possible. English folks, your test comes in February, so you should've already been prepping them as much as possible, and remember that your time isn't over after Feb. You'll then need to prep them for the other subject tests in April." So basically, after I finish teaching them how to take the innane English portion of the test, I will need to teach them science, history, and math, as well. Yeah, that's why I got my master's degree in LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING!!!
• The Chancery grading system. Our grades were due at 2 today, but the system was so overloaded (it's internet based) that it took 45 minutes to load each class. Then, they announced at 11 that Chancery would be completely down from 11-2 but that grades would be due at 2. [???????]
• reminder that we might want to "play around" with the computations a little bit to make sure that our failure rates were low.
• Leaving in the middle of the workday to go home without permission--PRICELESS