Dealing with Unprofessional Coworkers

Hey, just needed to get this off my chest. I don't want to keep fuming about it and get back to enjoying my spring break. This is my seventh year teaching and it's tied with my fourth as the most difficult year I've had so far. I work at an extremely underperforming school and we have had massive teacher shortages the past three years straight. There are about 10 licensed and experienced teachers in the entire school at this point - myself included. The rest of the staff is either long term subs or IAs holding classes. I'm on a team of 4 and the head of my grade level by default. I have great relationships with my team, they are inexperienced but they are genuinely doing the best that they can and I really appreciate them. Unfortunately, their inexperience puts a lot of weight on my shoulders and I've had to take on 4 extra students this year because I have the best classroom management. That's been a lot since those students are a horrible mix with kids I already had. A fact I brought up but was ignored by administration. Still doing the best that I can. Another huge stressor has been that planning time is not at all respected by my school district and especially my school. Being underperforming, we're under a lot lot of scrutiny from both central office and the state. Instead of giving us support and prioritizing hiring more teachers, what this means in practice is constant meetings, micromangement, and additional tasks that don't support student learning and wastes our time. I'm lucky if I get one day of uninterrupted planning time a week - and that's only 40 minutes because I'm an elementary school teacher. I also have to attend all the IEP meetings for the entire grade level because I'm the only licensed teacher. I'm exhausted to say the least, most of my evenings are spent getting work done that couldn't be done during the day after I get home from my second job. A huge thorn in my side this year has been my math coach who's new to the school this year. He is knowledgeable, but I've personally found him to be unhelpful. My former math coaches were incredibly helpful, always sharing great ideas, and eager to help me teach, co-teach with me, or pull students for remediation. This guy refuses to communicate, never answers emails, and follows up to questions or requests for support days after the fact. I could just ignore it, if he wasn't a giant asshole on top of it. He regularly berates my team and I in meetings for our low tests scores or lesson plans not being completed by the time of his meetings. My personal lesson plans are always ready for me to teach. The district required 30 page documents that are just copy and pasted from the curriculum guide because we use scripted curriculum? Yeah that is far from my most pressing concern. It clearly isn't from him either, because I can check and see he only looks at them on our meeting days and never checks them again. Fast forward to this week, we were told to pause instruction and complete back to back testing on reading and math at the last minute after just finishing testing for both those subjects the past two weeks. My kids have been testing constantly for the past two months and we are over it. After completion I printed out both tests and review them with my class so they can see their scores, clarify misconceptions, and review test taking strategies. Apparently this pissed off the math coach and I get called into a meeting with my principal on Wednesday. He had called downtown and reported me. The kids are only supposed to take tests on the computer - which they did. But I'm not supposed to review the test with them on paper? I could not get a clear rationale on why this wasn't acceptable. I did the same thing with the reading test and was praised by both my principal and the reading coach. My principal agreed with me, told me his rationale was not communicated clearly, and was annoyed he didn't just talk to either of us and decided to go over both our heads needlessly. Cut to Friday, another pointless meeting. He's still mad about the testing thing and I asked him to explain what is so bad about reviewing a test with my students. He gives several different answers that made no sense, saying I should've found similar questions to review the same skill or projected each question on the smart board and reviewed it that way. For some reason he just doesn't want me to send the score reports home so that parents can see how their kids are doing. I told him that made no sense and he starts yelling in my face. I leave before I lose my temper. I reported him to my principal and we're supposed to have a conflict resolution meeting when we get back after spring break. I honestly just wanted to vent about what happened on Friday but writing all of this out, I'm just so tired. I've wanted to resign more times than I can count this year but can't bring myself to do it. I keep going back to what happened this week and getting upset about it. The last thing I want to do is think about work during my spring break, but I'm having a hard time letting it go. Has anyone else been in a similar situation? submitted by /u/AffectionateHat957 [link] [comments]