>1. If it weren’t for rumors, I’d have no news at all.
2. I read lips a bit, but I don’t read minds. Not much.

You might be a teacher if the above makes sense to you – too much sense. The news trail is totally logical — along with the desire for a medical salt lick (Prozac in the lounge, Ritalin in the cafeteria) and the urge to write on a progress report “Johnny is a bully, much like his mother.”

How much information underload can I accept? Well —

I could accept that I didn’t have all the IEP information yet. The student was due to start in my class three weeks in the future, and I had progress reports to write, benchmark reading assessments for my entire class, assignments for a graduate class and a study group due first. I skimmed the IEP with an eye to reading it fully before the child arrived.

I could accept that the special education teacher might have more information than I did at first, but knowing that she shared that information with a different teacher and didn’t tell me, that’s just wrong. Careless, too. The other teacher, at another grade level that has nothing whatsoever to do with my grade mentioned this information to me – casually, over lunch. “Oh, I just happened to know.”

I could almost accept that another teacher “just happened” to have information on my incoming new kiddo. Almost. But I cannot accept her attitude that I “should have known” and should have sought out this information on my own. Uh-huh, yeah. See #2 above.

Thank goodness for the grapevine; I should probably be grateful. If the gym teacher hadn’t mentioned this info in the first place (also casually, as we approached the copy machine), I’d have been totally in the dark. As it is, I’m only seething under a dark cloud of hard feelings. Direct communication? What a concept. See #1.

Now if only I can train the grapevine to bring me chocolate and coffee….