As I relax out here, I thought I’d offer the following paragraphs, taken from the book that I am trying to write, because it feeds into an area of aggravation I thought worth blogging. This is not a sweeping where-is-the-money post– except in the sense that I think my small substitute teaching issue should be considered part of a larger and by now absurd picture.

I could not even bring myself to write during June of 2012. I was honestly feeling too clobbered. I don’t know if I felt guilty exactly. I had done what I was supposed to do. I had communicated with other teachers in my professional learning community (PLC) to create common lesson plans. I had taught what the others taught when they taught it. I had adapted what I could. I had worked extremely hard to fulfill my many responsibilities. I had attended endless meetings. I was out of the school for more than 10% of the school year, being “professionally developed” in obligatory seminars that were part of Illinois’s attempt to raise the scores of its failing schools. In short, I had done everything the way I was supposed to do it and I had worked nonstop.

But my students ended up no readier for college than they were when I started. In effect, they were less ready. They should have been learning a great deal more grammar and vocabulary this year. Instead, they learned about women’s roles in the original thirteen colonies. They learned about slavery and the cotton gin. They read stories and teased out main ideas, a useful skill, but only if a student can then express those ideas clearly and cogently. They learned some new grammar and vocabulary, thanks to language-oriented lesson planning, but not nearly as much as they ought to have learned.

My professional development absences added to their learning losses. All those subs — or worse, no-subs, when no one on the sub rolls wanted to work in the middle school — contributed to the problem. At times, six teachers in my school were out of the school for obligatory, state professional development meetings without a single sub in sight. That almost always meant students doubling up classes with some poor teacher on-site, sometimes not even a teacher in the same subject area as the teacher being “developed” outside the building.

True fact. I spent over 18 days out of the classroom that year, many of them due to Illinois’s Rising Star program to improve schools failing under NCLB. That sub issue was real. At times, the Building Leadership teams from all district schools were out being professionally developed. On those days, sometimes our buildings had no subs. The subs for our district went to the easier elementary schools or the high school, ducking the more problematic middle school.

Here’s why I find this thought a little funny right now. I filled out the sub application for my old district in early December, having finally gotten a bit bored with retirement. I called a few weeks later. The head of Human Resources said she was going to get around to sub applications after the new year. I still have heard no word. Maybe I was too much of a pain during my last year. I was not terribly complimentary about a number of issues on my exit form. But I know my old building still struggles for dedicated subs. In the meantime, two districts are waiting for my fingerprints to come back. The Regional Office of Education takes fingerprints, but mine were a fail somehow, so the office is doing a name check with the FBI, a process that I am told can take a month or two. I have hopes for results from a police station I visited as back-up. As part of teaching, I have probably had my fingerprints taken five times already, but no central database seems to exist. So I wait. I cannot work until my prints or name check come back. I will finish another application today.

Eduhonesty: So often we hear cries for the government to fix America’s schools. Before we hand too many responsibilities over to our government leaders, though, I’d like to point to those Rising Star absences and my missing fingerprints. I might throw in the paperwork that one district sent through the snail mail. That snail must have slept for most of the week. Government bureaucracies have not been impressing me lately.

Readers, we have here one experienced teacher who is willing to work. In fact, she is wanting to work, she is waiting to work. She has been waiting since December. This is getting silly.