Lately, I’ve been trying not to let people get to me. I’ve been trying to let things be as they are because life is too short to get angry at people over petty nonsense.
But Melissa - the other UW co-op here at the school - is really pissing me off.
To vent my frustrations, here are the reasons why:
- She is completely useless. As a person with a major in Speech Communication (I can hear Dr. Hibbert’s chuckling right now), she has absolutely no experience in anything useful to tutoring students here at Bronte. The majority of students require assistance in Data Management, Advanced Functions, Chemistry and Physics. These are the subjects that I cover. There are also some students who require assistance in English (ESL kids). These are the people that Melissa was hired to help. However, there are two full time staff members who assist them as well. So, she has nothing to do.
On Friday, November 7th, I was teaching lessons to three kids at once in three different subjects. Student A was getting a prep course in Data Management (he is taking it next semester) and we were covering permutations. Student B was taking a distance education course through the Independent Learning Centre, and the topic was Mathematics of Personal Finance. Student C was also doing Data Management, but she is taking it this term, and was doing Probability.
Due to a scheduling mishap, all three of these students were present at the same time. Melissa, unable to help any of them, was chatting it up with some students that she has become friends with. They got really noisy. And I told them in as loud and stern a voice as I could muster that they needed to leave. I didn’t care where they went or how loud they talked once they got there, but if they were going to be that loud then they had to do it somewhere else.
And the sad part was that the group included a member of the staff. A teacher should never be inconvenienced like that by another teacher. It was unbelievable. I was helping three kids with three topics at the same time and she was doing nothing.
- She doesn’t do any work. Whenever she is in the tutorial centre, she is working on one or both of her distance education courses from Waterloo (an English course (ha!) and PD4). Whenever she isn’t doing that, she is surfing Facebook or chatting it up with her student friends. For a week and a half now, I’ve been trying to get her to do some office clean up. We have course books that need to be placed in folders and put in a filing cabinet. I sorted the books by topic. All she had to do was take manilla folders (from the nearby pile of manilla folders) and labels (from the nearby pile of labels), combine them, and put the books inside. She still hasn’t done it.
I’m also trying to make a digital database of student tutorial records (which we are supposed to keep). She has done absolutely nothing to help with that (even though the database is built, and data entry is all that is required at this point). She cannot even schedule students for tutoring times without assistance. My schedule is written out clearly on a grid at the desk. If a student wants help, check their availability against my availability and slot them in. It’s that easy! There is really no need to confer with me about whether I am truly available during that time.
- She is lazy. Although this is emphasized by everything previous, she is extremely lazy. She has a social function on the evening of Thursday, November 13, and she has somehow talked her way out of her at 1:20pm. The social function is at 6:45pm! She’s leaving about 5 hours early to get back to Waterloo (less than an hour drive if you are leaving that early). This is psychotic.
Meanwhile, I have to stay behind to continue to host the mandatory study sessions, which goes from 7:00 - 9:00. I tried to get out of it, but, as usual, this place bent me over a table and really gave it to me good. I cannot believe this. I would also appreciate a three and a half day weekend to spend with my girlfriend/family/etc. But no. No. I have to stay behind. She is abandoning all of her students (although they are few and far between) and I’m stuck with cleaning up the mess. Unbelievable. I bet if I had breasts, I could get out of this kind of stuff too. Christ…
I am boiling over with anger right now. If she was a he, I’d punch her the next time I saw her. Instead, I’m going to dump as much work as I can on her for the rest of the term and see if I can revive her work ethic somehow. She is truly useless…but I guess that’s what happens when you are in one of the useless arts programs (communications, human resource management, etc). Get a real degree.