I've been feeling a lot like this ole' bloke for the past few days. I recently went into the doctor and he decided to diagnose me with strep throat. I'm finishing up my last week at my custodian job and I couldn't think of a better time to be sick. I have a bunch of sick days left and I really look for any reason to use them. In the past couple of months I've seen the family doctor, dentist, orthodontist, optometrist, dermatologist, and one timely visit to the ski doctor. I hadn't been to that last one in ten years which almost caused a depletion in my frozen H2O crystalline processing cells. It's very deadly if not treated regularly.
The problem I've now come to see is that in my future profession, such days like this will not be a "free" day off. My sister-in-law, who is also a teacher, just gave birth to her first child in October. She spent every weekend slaving over lesson plans for her long term substitute. When she came back from maternity leave she proceeded to reteach most of everything the substitute had taught because of rubbish teaching skills. She also had to redo her whole classroom management plan because the students pretty much had free reign while she was gone.
I've seen many teachers coming in at the wee hours of the morning to write lesson plans so that the day wasn't a total waste for the kids. I feel elementary is especially hard when taking days off. I saw a huge contrast in lesson plans when I was subbing at the middle school compared to the elementary school. The middle school teachers were able to put all of their plans on one single-spaced piece of paper. The lesson plans for an elementary teacher came in all shapes and sizes. Large font, small font, cute font, in folders, stapled, rhombus, and hexagon. It really reminded me of the scene from Better Off Dead when the teacher asks the math class to pull out their math homework and they each have a huge contraption to get it done.
I've lost track of where I was going with this post (I blame it on the medication.) The point I'm getting at is that I know teaching is hard and I now realize that it's counterproductive to provide sick leave and then make it more difficult to take a sick day then just man up and teach sick for a day. I mean I work in a place where snot is literally dripping from noses and coughing in someones face seems to be a new form of saying, "HI."
A school is as close to a walking petri dish as one can find. It kind of sucks knowing that if I get sick, it might just be easier to tough it out and go to work rather than spend a lot of time writing a lesson plan that will probably need to be retaught anyway. What a catch 22 I've gotten myself into. Thank goodness for Bill Nye Videos (authors note: please, someone take away my teaching license if I ever resort to doing this.) Well, at least I get to enjoy this last week of my old job on sick leave. I'll be sure to enjoy every cold sweat, sore throat, and nauseous feeling I have this week.
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