Sulking and silently fuming on the Mass Rapid Train as I am typing this. I have exactly ten minutes before I need to pick my son up at the childcare centre.

Today was a rough day for me for various reasons. First, a young lady, conscious about her looks, came to school with two earrings on each ear. This was against the school rules, so I got her to take them off. She refused, stating that if she took them off, her ear lobes would close. Alrighty. My question to her would be, why didn’t you ensure that you had a transparent stick to stick in your ear? But alas, I couldn’t ask that question because she walked away from me.

Apparently, she then turned nauseous and sought to leave school early. I had to clarify the matter with her mother. She was upset that the school didn’t practise compassion with her daughter because she recently had a spate of latecoming incidents and lacked the motivation to attend school. “Are your school rules really that important?” she retorted.

Guess I was calm enough because I responded in a way that soothed her feelings. Of course, I apologised.

Subsequently, I entered my classroom, only to find out that one boy had poked his friend with a pen/pen knife. He insisted that it was a pen; two of his classmates were brave enough to point out that he had used a pen knife. Anyway, the weapon of choice was thankfully not important because the victim seemed to suffer a superficial wound.

However, my students were observing how I would handle the issue, so I lectured the aggressor about bullying and stuff like that. I would spare you guys the torture of reading my well-measured lecture.

After my last class, I settled down to set the comprehension passage for the final year exam. I expected to be able to go home around 4.30pm. But, to my horror, I realised that my Head of Department had decided to change the formatting of the comprehension questions. The cognitive load of having to adjust to the new formatting and getting it represented in the document delayed my work flow and disrupted my thinking. I ended up leaving at 5.30pm.

My Head of Department is an empathetic and competent boss, but she has the tendency of dropping the ball because her plate is overflowing. To me, this problem could have been easily avoided if she had delegated the setting of the Terms of Specification to someone else. I would have gladly done it to make my life easier.

While I have finished setting the Final Year Exam, I still need to revamp the workbook for next term. The comprehension exercises there need to be aligned with the exam passage; otherwise, my students wouldn’t be able to derive much value from it. I don’t mind doing the work, but I don’t like to feel rushed into doing things, especially when the alternative way of delegating work seems so obvious to me.

I will need to find time to manage my boss and give her direct feedback because it’s affecting my productivity. It’s a task that I don’t look forward to, but well, it is what it is.

I will like to end this on a positive note. Thank you, Stacker, for the huge zap on my post yesterday. Rest assured that I will pay it forward by organising some bounties!