I heard a few interesting comments from other teachers today.  In all of the comments, the teachers are expressing some level of disgust and or contempt for the administration.  I thought it would be interesting to write them down… perhaps I’ll have to keep a log throughout the year.

In the first instance, we had just gotten out of a faculty meeting.  The meeting was in the auditorium, which is down a long hallway from the main portion of the building.  As you exit the auditorium, there is a set of doors leading directly out into the parking lot.  For whatever reason, these two doors were locked (with padlocks).  We had to walk down a long series of halls to get back to the front door - probably 3 to 4 minutes of casual walking.

One teacher was clearly annoyed and she started complaining.  She said something to the effect that the administrators did whatever they could to make our lives miserable.  Then she said, “It’s bad enough we have to be here every day!”

The second incident revolves around a problem with scheduling.  Our school is set up into small learning communities - clusters.  Each student has a cluster of four teachers (English, Math, Social Studies, Science), and these four teachers meet together for common planning.

Somehow, the clusters got lopsided.  Some clusters have far more students than others, and as a result some teachers have far more students in their classes than others.  I got lucky - I’ve got an average of 15 to 20 students in every class.  Some teachers have over 30 students, though.  Meanwhile, there are some teachers that have 10 or fewer students in some classes.

One of the teachers that had a lot of students in her classes was giving the assistant principal a hard time.  She wanted to know why the classes couldn’t be balanced better.  After the meeting, we asked her why she kept asking questions.  This usually just causes more trouble for you in the long run.  She said, “If he’s going to make my life hard, I’m going to make his life hard too.”

The final comment revolves around NJQSAC.  Our school is going under review this week in this process, starting Thursday.  Even though we’ve known about this for a long time (it was public knowledge since last year), the administration has done little to prepare the school for it.

Today, we got a crash “inservice” in some important topics.  One of which was medical care for students.  The school nurse got up and read from a piece of paper for 10 minutes to ensure that we all knew what services were provided.  We were also “trained” in using the emergency defribrillator.  It was a complete was of time.

As we were discussing the pointlessness of the meeting, one teacher responded, “Sometimes they make me just hate working here.”

So there you have it.  Three incidents - some more serious than others - and the comments of three disgruntled teachers.  If only the administration could get its act together…

This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Education, Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.