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Today I went to an all-day. highly touted teacher in-service about reading. It appears to have been planned by five-year-olds with a box of dull crayons. We were all jammed into the cafeteria (not the auditorium, dunno why) of the second-oldest high school in our system (older than me!), because the other "good" schools are under construction. I know for a fact that *my* school is available, but we were stuck with this place. For some odd reason, we were all jammed in one end of the cafeteria. The speaker had an overhead projector pointed at the wall to one side, BEHIND half of his audience, who were crammed in too tightly to turn around comfortably. Much rearrangement of limbs and polite apologizing ensued. The overheads were illegible. They weren't in our packet. The sound system cut out every time the speaker turned his head, so we heard every five words or so. Our packet was assembled at random, without page numbers, and all the handouts looked, superficially, the same. By break time, 200 cranky women had three toilet stalls available to them. We took over the men's room, too. (There were maybe four men there.) By lunch, we were all snarling. We were given soggy, warm box lunches. We had to take them outside, because our school system's cafeteria contract wouldn't allow us to eat them (evil catered food) in the cafeteria. The speaker was okay after lunch, but finally admitted that he wasn't speaking about his latest book (the title of which was the title of the session, and a copy of which we were all given), but about his earlier work. Best part of the day was a breakout session with other teachers, in which ideas were exchanged. We could have just ordered the book for everyone, put us in rooms by grade level to chat, had bagels, and gone home. Don't know what they paid the poor speaker. Tomorrow is day 2 of the conference. I'm taking snacks and toilet paper. |
 
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How Not to Amuse Teachers