An Afternoon in a Teacher´s Room

Report Card time is something dreadful. You need to launch the grades that the students got during the semester on a panel on the extra-net. In addition to that, you have to write a comment that suits the student in terms of behavior and achievements. Not a pleasant task at all when you have to do that for 200 students.

The staff of teachers has come up with a set of sentences to help accelerate this task. Therefore, all you have to do is cut and paste the sentence that best fits the students. After some time you end up always writing the same thing and it seems pointless. However, bureaucracy is part of our daily lives. So, there is really no way out.

This semester the system has changed a bit in terms of time. Teachers had to fill out these comments even before grades were given, so that they could be checked for spelling mistakes or any other mistake that might show up after printing. Now you might think there was a group of people to do that job. But no. The teachers have to do it themselves. I, for one, believe that other people should proof read what we write. You might overlook the mistake when it comes to proofreading your own material. I, for one, also believe that this is a waste of paper. If the space where we need to make the comment were bigger, perhaps we would be able to catch the incorrect word when taking another look online without having to print it out.

This week, since I had a break between my classes, I decided to go into the teacher´s room and work on the editing of my report card comments. When I opened the door, I was thrown back by the singing that was coming from the room. There were ten teachers in that room singing as they worked on their comments. I just stood there and was taken back to the time when the field workers picked cotton and sang their blues away. The soundtrack of that moment in my mind was something like the song “ Day-o , day-o , day light come and me wanna go home”. However, to my surprise, these teachers were singing a heartwarming Samba.

Whoa! What was I getting myself into?

(September 11, 2014)Todos os direitos reservados a Meire Marion.

Listen to the song I mentioned in the text at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMigXnXMhQ4

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