So teaching is all about making the best use of your time. Whether you're an elementary or secondary teacher, your day is broken up into little segments of time, and as a high school teacher, we have nine 39-minute little chunks. Five of those are actual teaching periods. One is some sort of duty. The other three are "off" periods, one of which is usually spent wolfing down your lunch. So that leaves you with two 39-minute chunks in which to do your photocopying, call parents, respond to emails, deal with paperwork like field trip forms, and whatever else comes up.
Sometimes, huge monkey wrenches get thrown into the works, so that as you think you are being efficient with your time, such as leaving the photocopy room while your job waits to print so that you can go make a parent phone call, what's really happening is you just totally sabotaged yourself. That's just what I did. I had a photocopy job in the machine's queue, which was quite full. Rather than stand there and wait for my job, which was a rubric I needed to grade an assignment, to print out, I went back to finish my lunch. (Yes, most teachers work during their lunches in some way.) I guess the part of all of this that was my fault was that I forgot to go back and pick up my copies before heading off to my next class.
I realized this, of course, in the middle of teaching, and this was a teaching period that was followed by another teaching period. Nonetheless, I decided to run down to the copy room between classes to grab my rubrics. However, when I got there, my rubrics were nowhere to be found. I checked the shelves in the room where people usually place abandoned copies; I even checked the garbage can. No sign of my 150 rubrics.
I figured someone had probably picked them up by accident. If this had happened, this meant that the person who would discover this pile of rubrics would not know to whom they belonged. So I figured the best way to let people know, "Hey, I have 150 copies of a rubric floating around out there, and they're mine," was by sending out an email to the whole faculty. You know, being efficient; making the best use of my time. I assumed someone would discover them and either return them to me or to the copy room by the end of the school day.
No such luck.
Of course, the next day, I realized I would have to make another 150 copies of my rubric so I could get grading on the papers I had collected. That was how I had planned to use my "off" periods that day. Off I go, back to the copy room, to slaughter some more trees. But wait -- what's this? The copy machine is broken! Not just an ordinary paper jam, mind you, but horribly mangled. Well, maybe not mangled, but something was really wrong that required professional intervention. Oy. Off I go now to the copy lady. Lo and behold, HER copy machine is broken, too! And not just an ordinary paper jam either, but another situation requiring a professional. Both machines available to teachers in the building were going to be down for, likely, the whole day.
In an attempt to avoid completely wasting my off periods, I went to the special ed department and begged them to make about 10 copies of my rubric on their little private machine, just so I could be somewhat productive. Luckily, they complied. At least not a total waste of a day.
Amd by the way, I never found those 150 copies!
