Meetings are a real pain in the....

 
Meetings use to be a part of my life. There seemed to be a meeting everyday about some new problem, task or initiative. In education this is generally not the case. We have a meeting every week, but it is an hour or so compared to about an hour a day. There is always an exception to a rule though, and the first week is our exception. To put it plainly meetings are a real pain in the butt.

 This week we spent going to meetings. We had to sit and listen to stuff for roughly 6 or 7 hours during the day. Brutal, is a good way to describe it. Now this is not the fault of the administration. The state shoulders most of this blame. By the time I am finished with these meetings I never want to sit down again. In fact, sitting here writing this, I am ready to stand up.

  The really hard part is trying to pay attention. Most of the presentations that you attend are about as dry as you can get, and are slowed down as much as possible. These include but are not limited to spotting abuse, what initiatives the administration or the state has put into place. We sit there as things are laid out as simple as possible for us. It becomes harder and harder to listen as the day goes on. It reminds me of the old apple commercial that was done in the 80’s with everyone sitting there watching the screen. You pray for the person to come through and destroy the screen to liberate you from the training.

  I am done now with the training, and to be honest had to give a few of those boring lectures myself this week. It is really hard to balance the need to inform with the need to entertain. I am not completely sure why we have to go through these trainings each week. One of my theories is that the reason that they send us through these trials is to separate the week from the strong. The other is one that says that they cannot trust us to stay at work all week without filling our time up. What do you think?

Next week, school begins again. I will return next week for my first blog of the new school year. The anxiety is beginning to mount in me as the day draws nearer.

Until next week,

“When I give a lecture, I accept that people look at their watches, but what I do not tolerate is when they look at it and raise it to their ear to find out if it stopped.”

 Marcel Achard quotes (French Playwright, 1899-1974)

Welcome back

    Emotions tend to run high for teachers before they start back to work. I have a friend that confessed to having nightmares of the first day of school. I myself have had a few dreams about going back. The last of which had me walking around to classes just like the kids and panicking about how I was not ready for the year.  This takes me back to the dreams that we all have before school starts when we are kids. The dreams where you had left your pants at home, or showed up to school without any supplies. The feeling of panic as you move into the next year is the same that the teacher's feel when they take to the classroom for the first time. This is a really uncertain time for us, and as the first actual day of school approaches we begin our nerotic rituals. My mom use to work in a school and a friend of her's use to say that every year she would stay awake before the start of school and have a little panic attack about the first day of school.
    This is my last post before I go back to work. School may not start until the 22nd of this month for us, but I have to report back for a week of meetings and training. (More on the joy of that next week) The uncertainty for both teachers and students are the same. We both worry about the class and if the students will be a good group, or a group from hell. We also worry about what the year has in store for us. The sense of panic eventually subsides when the semester is over, only to be replaced with the next semester.
  So as the summer winds down, and we work towards a new school year here is to optimism. Here is to a new year that is full of new experiences which will be hopefully more good than bad.  This is a unique feeling, one that captures exactly what we do. I have never had this range of emotions about any other job, and do not think that I will.

"If there were no schools to take the children away from home part of the time, the insane asylums would be filled with mothers." -Edgar W. How

Next week: The perfect week a school with no children.

Back from the future....

The summer is a time for adventure. Travel is something that I love to do, and something I make time for at the end of every school year. This summer I visited Europe, and traveled to several places in the US, but I got a glimpse of the future. I got to see what things will be like in 15 years. I had just returned from my trip to New Orleans, still realing from all the good food and drink that slowed me down to a crawl. I had intended for the next day to be detox. I had adopted a vegitarian life style for a couple of days to try and account for the wonderful food that New Orleans has. I woke up in the future. I woke up and I hurt all over wonderin.g if it was still just aftereffects of gourging myself on New Orlean's cuisine. I looked around to a different room, and found out that that nothing was how I left it. Panic begin to rise as a voice called out that breakfast was almost ready. The voice that rung out was my wife, and the panic began to settle a bit. Until, I realized that my wife never cooks breakfast.
          At that time the TV switched on, and the much older face of Dwayne "the rock" Johnson peered out into my beadroom. He began to talk and on the bottom of the screen it said president Johnson. I laughed out loud. He stated that the country's debt was out of control and that all 50 Trillion of it would need to be dealt with soon. The Rock then told me about how the debt was going to be fixed by the benefactor of the world and the owner of the moon China. The news spoke of how our education system was getting help from Samalia and India due to our low literacy rate, and the canadian border had been sealed to prevent people from moving into Canada for undocumented work.
   I turned off the news in disbelief, and picked up a thin flexible peice of glass that was by the bed. Amazon Kindle Xtreme raced across it's transparent screen. The date, July 20th 2026, flashed on the screen and then settled itself in the upper corner. As a microphone appeared on the middle of the screen and asked for what kind of news or sports I was interested in. My voice shaky I stated I wanted education news. The education section of the news paper showed that teacher pay had been lowered again due to the fact that it was not acceptable for teachers to make the same as housekeepers and lawn service crews. An article caught my attention that stated that the state had again increased the class size to 40.
   The picture looked fairly bleak. Trash was on the streets. Caesar a monkey had successfully become the first non-human governor of California (they are so progressive). What I found most horrifing was the fact that the national pass time has become NASCAR. Snookie was a senator from California who was fighting for later bar hours for the entire country. The world was indeed a bleak place. After reading that bit of information my heart started to ache and I woke up safe and sound here at my house in good old 2011.
  Now of course all of this is a dream, or a really bad attempt at humor, but there is a point. This summer has seen the debt ceiling being raised, and has also seen the reduction of even more teachers from the classroom. China has really started to play it's hand as a dominant figure, as jobs are outsourced over seas. My point is that education is a founding principal of our nation. Our budget may be set, but the fight for the future continues. Education is a tool to be used to further a society. Without it the society seems to falter and fold. The Ancient empires of the past have all had one thing in common. They were overrun by people that were better adapted to survive and thrive in that world. They allowed complacency to rule them, and in the process were taken over. Our fight is different from theirs. We do not have to worry about armed invaders coming in and taking our homes. Instead we have to worry about us being competitive in the job market. Our economy continuing to grow as it has since the end of World War II. We stand at a crossroads for our country. We have multiple problems to face, but how we tackle them will be our legacy.

Until Next Week (I will be back for one more pre-school blog and then we are back to our regularly scheduled program),

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
William Butler Yeats