home sick

I've taken a rare day off and called in sick.  The groundwork for this got laid yesterday when I was sneezing like a fiend and my nose was running like a dripping faucet.  I know, I know; gross, huh?  And I almost fell asleep at my keyboard before noon.  I usually hold that stunt off until 2 or 3 in the afternoon.  It might have been the less-than-exhilarating job of updating projected enrollments for classes which start later on in the term.  Normally, I'd be all over that work; I must have been off.

Miz Susan approved my sick leave but only with a few conditions attached.  Incuded among those conditions:
   1) that I'd iron a bunch of the shirts that have piled up in the front bedroom.
   2) that I'd check with Wet Paint to see if they've restocked the Stabilo markers she uses to deface her 4th graders' written work and which she's demanded as her Valentine's Day gift.  She'll pick out her own flowers but thanks for asking.
   3) that I'd customize the "St. Paul Kids Deserve" sign which will soon grace our front lawn.  Or the snow banks that cover it, anyway.  More on this later.
   4) that I'd pull ingredients together for the big-ass salad that's on the menu for tonite's dinner.
   5) that I take a nap and take it easy. And that I not leave the house.

Well, I've already left the house to start her car and sweep it off for her commute to Monroe Arts Plus.  And I'll probably have to get out at least once more for the Wet Paint stock check and salad ingredients.  She'll be disappointed that I didn't follow her advice to the letter but she's probably used to that by now.

Miz Susan might be in for a few unscheduled (but unpaid) days at home herself.  The higher-ups of the Saint Paul Federation of Teachers (her union) voted to authorize a strike vote and set February 24th as the date for this.  It's been a long time coming.

Her employer and her union have been negotiating a new contract for teachers since sometime last May.  I  recall reading or hearing that the two sides have settled on less than half of the points under discussion.  Now both sides have got their heels dug in.  At stake are classroom sizes, additional staffing (both in the teaching and support ranks: social workers, librarians, school nurses among others), the heinous emphasis by administration on standardized testing and the huge blocs of time dedicated to preparing for and taking them, addressing special needs in the classroom: language, remedial learning, behavior, etc. and, not least of all (though administration loves to put it at the top of the list: translation: greedy teachers.  some media outlets have been quick to forward this practically rote), teacher compensation.

This standoff comes about after years of the St. Paul Public Schools ruling class slashing budgets, cutting back on staffing in the separate classrooms and buildings, increasing class sizes, ignoring the increasing challenges of the necessity to meet special needs of students.  And all the while slyly intimating with a wink-wink and a nudge-nudge that the teachers and other front line staff aren't doing their utmost to provide a top flight education for the district's students and families.  Nothing of the of current negotiations deadlock should be much of a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention to to the system's upper tier's previous program of denial, cutbacks, duck and cover and deliberate spreading of misleading quasi-information.  And I'd fall over in a dead faint if I were to learn that administration's budgets have suffered cuts at the same levels as the classrooms' and support functions'.

It was particularly stomach-turning to read SPPS Superintendent Valeria Silva's quotes in the paper today.  If she was quoted accurately, she pretty much laid the blame for the situation squarely on the teachers and their union.  If rank and file votes to approve a strike and goes out onto the picket lines, Superintendent Silva knows that all the negative consequences of a strike (closed schools and the pre- and post-school day programs, the district's food services, forced layoffs for non-union employees, a likely lengthening of the school year into the summer, the general collapse of western civilization as we know it) will be solely on the shoulders of those greedy and lazy slacker teachers.  I'll give her credit for keeping a straight face as she slopped this pap out into the microphones and cameras and reporter's notebooks of an attentive media.  She may have been engrossed in calculating the savings the district will realize if the System shuts down for one or two or three weeks and the effects that those savings will have on her annual performance bonus.  That'd be some high-powered arithmetic and enough to keep a smile off anyone's lips.  Until, of course, the check arrives.

So, despite administration's longstanding war against teachers and the work they do (and, by extension, against kids and families), the Superintendent's conscience is clear.  She and the rest of the inhabitants of 360 Colborne (many of who are honest and honorable and hardworking) bear no responsibility for this impasse.  Here's another fine mess you've gotten us into.

There's a comforting continuity in this empty, amoral rhetoric of the current Superintendent. Her predecessors Patricia Harvey and Meria Carstarphen were shameless bullies and blowhards and elitists.  Ms Silva has either dug up some of their old scripts or she comes by her behavior naturally.  Is this a great country or what?

I actually stuck pretty close to the conditions that Miz Susan laid down before she went off to work at her low-intensity and overpaid job.  I ironed and I checked on markers at Wet Paint (beware 4th graders, your slacker teacher is rearmed), the St. Paul Kids Deserve sign is now customized and graces a snow bank on what is hopefully still our lawn underneath and I pulled salad ingredients together which led to a rave review.  I even took a short nap though I couldn't do the markers without venturing abroad to Grand Avenue and Wet Paint and over to the Midway for General Tso's chicken wings and peapods at Cub.  And I might (might) even  have swung through the Goodwill but, if I did, I didn't buy anything.  To quote Miz Susan, "You can stay home sick any day."