The Meeting

Pretty quiet day at work for the working part of the day... there was a lady from the district that came to observe me, but was really nice, introduced herself, wrote on a pad for about 20 minutes, and left. I was among the lucky ones, because most of the teachers at my school neither got a greeting nor an handshake. Evidently, most of these evaluators were not all that kind on the evaluations they filled out, either...

which brings us to the after school faculty meeting. Basically, we sat there for a full hour, hearing from our principal what a worthless bunch of teachers we were. Negative comment after negative comment was read aloud to us, with the occasional positive note being read once in awhile with about the same tone of voice as the negative. The comments were as rude as one teacher's classroom being labeled as "hostile." One dude said it was probably him and we all were ribbing him about it in the parking lot.


I got observed by the district person just today, so I knew that none of the comments were about me (my paperwork would not have been finalized yet), but it upsets me to see good people - my own coworkers - addressed so. The atmosphere suggested that I was not the only one who felt this way. You could feel the tension in the room... you ever been somewhere where a speaker infuriated the audience so much that some people got up and walked out? Well, there's always a time some minutes before that, where you can hear a pin drop, and the speaker is able to speak without interruption only because of the courtesy and decency of those listening. The speaker's hold is slipping, for you know that courtesy and decency will only allow one to suffer insults silently for so long...

An "expert/consultant" (whatever you want to call it) was said to have said that our school has a lot of teachers who are not motivated to teach... if he'd sit in one of our faculty meetings, he'd understand why.

78 school days remaining...