A Minor Work Rant

So, I'm sitting here in my work office right now. Yes, I'm blogging at work. You might ask, "Why are you blogging, Ashlee? Don't you have so much to do?"

Actually, no. My classroom teaching team got everything done early. We worked super hard on Monday and Tuesday and finished things up Wednesday. We finished cleaning the classroom, organizing the office, filing our paperwork...And now? Now we're...not sure what to do. There's a movie playing on one office computer, I'm here on my computer, and some other teachers are just wandering around. We have a peer file review, but we can't start that until our manager gets here....at 1pm.

Fantastic. I mean, I'm all for movies and hanging out, but I feel a tad guilty that tax dollars are going to pay for this. "But why don't do you do stuff? Be efficient and productive?" Well, we sort of did that already. All of our classroom books are alphabetized (and put on different shelves according to whether they belong in the curriculum, are random books, or are books allocated to the site). All of our teacher resource books are organized, along with the binders that come along with them. Our classroom is completely wiped down and has passed the inspection by the Facilities staff. Remember? I already made a little post about Celeste and I indulging in our inner organization-freak drive.

Now, I could start planning for next year, but a lot is already planned (as in, I have all the lesson plans from this year saved so that I can expand on them next year). Plus, I'm going to be working over the summer with the other members of my Early Childhood Education (ECE) Teach For America (TFA) cohort on scheduling indicators and goals for next year. Side note: There are a ton of acronyms that you'll become familiar with in the reading of this blog. So...planning is sort of happening already and I can't go too far ahead because I really value the work I'm going to be doing with the cohort this summer.

So I guess my rant is about efficiency and efficacy, which is something that I feel could be greatly improved upon in my workplace. I haven't had a lot of experience with working in a federal agency, but my little glimpse of experience through Head Start has made me aware of the bulging mass of bureaucracy the envelops these organizations.

I might go into more specific detail at a later time (because trust me, there are a lot of thoughts I have about more efficient and effective ways to do things), but right now I think I'm going to work on some Arizona State University (ASU) paperwork.

And then...maybe another movie? Or another post? Haha.