it's pronounced doo-MAHS

The story so far: due to his inability to accurately judge the amount of time necessary to adequately grade all the work he assigned over the trimester, our intrepid hero found himself entering the final week of class buried under a cavalcade of ungraded papers and assignments that threatened to drive what remains of his tenuous sanity into the nether regions of hell itself. Every new day brought frustrations and tortures galore as the piles seemed unchanged, perhaps even growing slightly. But as he woke on this final day, a flicker of light danced in the distance, through the remaining papers and essays, and for the first time in weeks he began to believe all was not lost.

Our hero is monumentally stupid, as will soon be proven.

After a few snatches of sleep, this beleaguered man stumbled into his waiting chariot and made his way to the school to finish off the final stack waiting for him there. Finish these, he thought, and only the final essays will stand between me and sweet freedom. He finished a good chunk of them in the stillness before the first exam. He fought through distractions during first bell and entered the final exam period on his schedule needing only to finish a smattering of research papers. As his second bell students finished his far-too-easy final, he scribbled furiously, scratching the scores down on a makeshift grade sheet until, just before the bell rang, only two papers remained. He passed back his student's work, impressed with his grading acumen, and gathered the remaining flotsam and jetsam scattered on his desk to deal with during his planning period. He felt the weight lift from his shoulders. A sense of peace waited for him, only minutes away, in the office he shared with his fellow teachers.

It was there, in that cramped, windowless polygon of brick that it all began to fall apart. As our exhausted champion sifted through the pile of miscellaneous detritus he brought with him, he could not locate the makeshift score sheet he had used to record the grades. Thinking he had left it back in his classroom, he made a trek through the empty halls back to the third floor to retrieve it from his desk.

Of course, it was not there.

Panic setting in, he cast about, searching every inch of his room, every nook and cranny where such an important piece of paper could hide, trying not to disturb the students taking their final exam and giving him concerned looks. He thrust his hands into the recycling box, hoping to find the elusive artifact amidst the discarded student work callously dumped there after his charges had noted their grade. Nothing. He retraced his steps back to the office, scanning the floor for any sign, any glimpse of his red marks next to student's names, to no avail. From the depths of his soul came a dark rush of nausea, colliding with the ominous cloud of despair, forming a swirling maelstrom of impending madness somewhere in the vicinity of his suddenly impotent brain. His world turned black. The grades he had so diligently finished were gone, vanished forever, never to be seen again.

The questions came crashing in. What had happened to it? What would he do? What could he do? What would happen to the final grades he had to turn in that weekend? Could he remember what they had earned? Could he reconstruct the morning's efforts? What if he made a mistake? He wandered the halls, clenching and unclenching his useless hands, imagining nightmare scenarios involving parent complaints, administration censure, loss of employment and managing a Wendy's franchise.

Eventually the students were freed from the farce of finals, leaving him alone in his ransacked room, wondering what to do next. He stared at the empty spaces in his gradebook, knowing not how they would ever be filled now. The darkness of the situation continued to haunt him, leaving him hopeless, directionless, useless. Slowly it became clear what he must do - he must face up to his error and reach out to the ones he had let down through his own irresponsibility and negligence. With a deep breath to quiet the storm in his head, he grabbed the keyboard lying on the desk and typed up an email to all those affected by his asininity, students and parents alike, asking for their forgiveness and their final grade, if they had not already carelessly trashed them.

So now he waits, saddened by the evidence of his own incompetence, hoping tomorrow finds his inbox filled with the redemption needed to put this horrible experience behind him and to enter the new trimester with the opportunity and determination not to screw up this stupendously ever, ever again.

Good luck with that, dumbass.
Æ

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