Leap First. Ask Questions Later.

I'm not the only new employee in our small school this year. The administrators are both new in one way or another. Our principal was previously the school's assistant principal and this is his first year in the big chair. So a new assistant principal was brought on to fill his old position. They are both good people and have both been very helpful in dealing with my least fun students. There is an area, though, in which their inexperience shows.

They have ideas about activities and programs that they want for our school. Mostly good ideas. But they commit the whole school to these ideas as they pop into their heads. They don't ask any of the staff for their opinions or seem to do any actual planning until after they have decided to do it.

One example: Several months ago, the principal bought a reading program to use in tutoring. Then he asked if any Language Arts teachers would do it. None of the others would because they knew the program and knew that it helps with fluency only, and most of our students need more help with comprehension. He ended up convincing some sixth grade teachers to do it, because he'd already paid for it.

More recently, someone decided that since it is the holiday season, we should have a canned food drive. No one asked the staff if this would be a good idea or if we were willing to do it (which I would have been). It was not even announced at a staff meeting or via email. The first I ever learned of the canned food drive was when I read it in the student bulletin. It said that the drive was beginning that week and that boxes for donations would be in homeroom classes. No one provided me with a box. No one even told me I had better bring a box. It was just announced that I would have one.

These sorts of things keep happening. There must come a day when they will run out of ideas. Or so I hope.

Take Out the Trash Day

Okay, it has been almost a month since my last post. So, I figure I had better write something. Nothing terribly interesting has happened lately (or I should say nothing that I expect readers will find terribly interesting). I'm just going to write about several marginally interesting things and hope that they add up to a decent post.

My RI class had been getting worse than ever, so I sent a list of the worst offenders and some of their behaviors to the VP. She has been setting up conferences with the students, the parents, herself and myself. For a few of them the parents never showed up. One of them ended with the student being sent directly to Opportunity Room for at least 30 days, and another of the most heinous offenders has been put on a behavior contract. If he screws up at all in the next two weeks, he's going to Opportunity. So far, he has been working hard to keep out of trouble. We will see if he can keep it up. Even if he can't, though, he will be out of my class. So it's win-win for me.

And now for something completely different...

Last year during negotiations, the teachers' union agreed with the district to have weekly after school meetings for up to an hour and a half. (Let it be known for the record that I was not at this district last year and had no hand in this agreement.) The way that it was justified to them was that many of these would be grade level or department meetings, in which the teachers could discuss whatever they felt was important. They really should have gotten that in writing. In the five months of the first semester, there have only been four times available for department meetings. Each other week we have had to attend all staff meetings where information is unloaded on us from the site and district administrations. This week we had our fourth department meeting of the year. The English department at least had been anticipating it, as we have multiple district mandated tests that we needed to plan and discuss. Our principal sent out an email that morning, though. Just in case any of the departments didn't have anything else to talk about, he gave us a list of eleven different topics to discuss. One of these was "Grading (Many F's)" -exact words.

We had our staff Christmas dinner last night. It was at a train station-turned-restaurant in the next little town over. I had never been there before and it was a pretty nice dinner and a comfortable space. I made my husband come with me, even though he hates meeting new people. It turned out all right though. The principal bought a bottle of champagne for each table. It turned out at our table we were seated with a couple of Mormons who don't drink alcohol and two women who had each come by themselves and were driving. I was driving, and my husband doesn't like wine, so no one even had a sip of the bottle which they had already opened. So, that was a total waste. At least, from looking at the bottle, it didn't seem too expensive.

That's all I can think of that won't totally bore you. Hopefully, my job will get more interesting in the near future. Probably not, as we only have two weeks until winter break. Oh well, if it comes to it, I will just start making stuff up.

P.S. If you didn't get the title reference, you need to watch more West Wing.