The week and a half that followed my first day of "training" and test grading never really got much better.
First, we spent 15-30 minutes every day getting set up. That means I showed up at 3:30, people slowly trickled in, and we never got started unti 4:00. We also usually finished between 7:00-7:15 and spent the leftover minutes filling in our time cards. Now, I am not a math person, but at $40 an hour per 200 graders, that adds up to roughly several gazillion dollars wasted of us sitting around drinking coffee and doing nothing.
The best part is when the state required that the booklets of a particular grade had to be finished and sent in that night. Every time, they had to scramble and ask people to volunteer to stay late to finish grading. I volunteered along with a dozen or so people a few times. Once I stayed until 9:00 PM. Meanwhile, all I could think was, "Gee, if they had handed out the booklets at 3:45 instead of 4:15, that would have been another 30 minutes of manpower among 200 people instead of 15 of us busting our asses to get this done."
The worst part, for me, as an overachiever, was getting labeled as such. Yeah, in middle school I was a big nerd. I thought by the time I reached a point where I was working with adults, that label would fade away. Nope. This one guy at my table was repeatedly telling me to slow down. When we finished a box and I would raise my hand to have them pick it up, he would pull my hand down. He would tell me to stop reading so quickly. Etc. I mentioned this to my friend who works for the DOE offices and her exact words were, "The higher up you get in the department, the more you see that. Having meetings about meetings. People sitting on their thumbs, getting paid to do nothing. Teachers getting cushy office jobs because they are horrible teachers are keep getting pushed through the system. That sort of thing."
Again. It instills a lot of confidence in the organzation, don't you think?
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