Wow... Just Wow.

This is a little different from my normal postings. I normally stick to just what goes on in the classroom, but it's relevant to my blog, and also highly annoying (at least to me) so I had to mention it.

I was wandering around the Internet today, and I noticed something very interesting... Someone was sending traffic to my blog! Wow, I thought, how kind. The nice person saw something in my blog and linked to me.

Then I noticed how they were describing me. They linked to one of my posts about Open House, where I was mentioning I was working really hard to get my desk cleaned off. I tossed out the overused, but still humorous (in my opinion), phrase about a clean desk being a sign of a diseased mind.

They said that this was just a sign of someone who doesn't "want to bother with coming up with a system for taking control of their environment."

As I mentioned above... Wow... just wow. That someone could read just that sentence and decide they know everything about me... They obviously didn't read the rest of my post, because I go on to say how I am going to really strive to keep it clean, and how I, strangely, put more emphasis on working with my students rather than being a neat freak.

They obviously didn't know about my library, (in which I have over 1,000 books that I have purchased with my own money to allow the kids to check them out, since I think reading is really important) which has a great system to allow them to check it out without me having to drop what I'm doing and go over to get a library sheet. It's super-organized, and countless teachers have come in my room just to see the library and have copied my idea.

And something else that really got me... the next thing they wrote was, "I notice that those people who have cluttered desks often end up being the ones who are late to submit their grades or who don’t respond to ARD input forms or whatever."

That really burns me up! I have never, not even once submitted my grades late, even though in our county we had a horrible gradebook program which routinely lost grades and would not work so we couldn't input grades. I also am not late in submitting any of the thousands of paperwork that needs submitting.

(I do miss meetings, but that's a different story. I can't, for some reason, remember to attend meetings. I have alarms set on my computer now, to remind me, so I will not miss them. See? I am working on improving myself.)

Now, you might be thinking I am annoyed because it's true. I have carefully thought about it, too, to make sure that's not it... but it's not! I am annoyed that this person linked to me in a negative way, using me as a negative example, when I am pretty sure they did not look at any of my other posts to see if I am an effective teacher. Because honestly, still in my own opinion, of course, I think what matters most is that I am an effective teacher.

Besides, my desk drawers are currently very clean and organized. I have what I need within reach of when I'm sitting. The top of my desk is not pristine right now, but grades are due this week, and I am currently in the process of inputting grades, so all of that is all over my desk. Before I started putting in grades, it was still clean!

I don't spend a lot of time at my desk. I am up, or in my chair in the front of the room, working individually with the kids. When my desk is cluttered, it's not a nice, calm place to work, but I don't really do work there, even when it is cleaned off. I do most of my actual grading of papers at home, not at school, because I don't find the time to do it at school. During the day, there are a million other things to do, like attend meetings (which I have not even missed one this year... yet...) and do lesson plans, and all those endless things that must happen right then, or dire consequences will befall us all.

Suffice to say, this really disturbed me. Oh, well. I can't really hold a grudge, I guess. I need to move on. I guess I should say at least people are coming to my blog because of it.

But it still wasn't very nice.