Time, Minimalism, And Metal Teeth.
In all probability, this is about half of my workday today.
The principal has gotten his wish, and today we have a Minimum Day, which means that the school dismisses students at about 12:30 PM. The teachers stick around to around three in the afternoon, and the meetings that we are all sequestered in are about the WASC documents. Apparently, we are supposed to get together and plan…for two and a half hours…how to present to the rest of the staff. The presentation will be about the documents that were created in committees, that were further divided into subcommittees.
The presentations are going to be NEXT WEEK, on a similar minimum day. The actual point of the presentations escapes me.
No one is ever going to give me some kind of “pop quiz” on our WASC documents, and furthermore, if they did…it would only reflect on me.
Educational hours are literally cut in half tomorrow. My hour long classes go down to half an hour, and attendance plummets. A half day of school before the weekend is an invitation for a three day weekend. Not just for students…several staff members take the minimum days as an open invitation.
Considering that I try to produce meaningful lessons, this nonsense scheduling over paperwork is just frustrating, random, and possibly a very inappropriate use of the time. Hesh has it on the nose, though….the Dark Lord and his Edu-Cronies aren’t going to honor any of the “bogus treaties” like the contract. That would be silly, especially if they can get metal teeth out of it.
As usual…the Dark Lord’s dialogue is based on actual things said to me. This is very much related to one of his last appearances in the strip, where he actually came out to the Badlands to observe. He sent along an “observation form” from an app the District made that he seems very excited about. When I ran into him, it was very much, “did you get that thing I sent you?” I did, but honestly, it was a whole lot less important to me than the other stuff in my e-mail inbox, like IEP meetings for students, and paperwork deadlines for grades and so forth. He was confused that I didn’t seem to be “blown away” by the first feedback I’ve ever gotten.
Speaking frankly, it was very positive. That’s great, but I knew that I was doing my job, and doing it well. I didn’t need to thrive off of some sort of external validation of that, which seems to be an alien concept to him.
Now that I’m working on the epic scale project of compiling student writing into an anthology hardcover by the 19th, I can just bring my laptop to this meeting, and look very busy. I will be, actually.
Ironically, my “shirking” here is in fact doing the job I’m supposed to be doing. That’s weird.
Tales of Adequacy! 