Faculty Meetings

So today we had this full faculty meeting at Edison.  And I was up at 4:30 am to take Rebecca to the airport.  And I'm exhausted.  A few things worth jotting down at the end of this long, long day.

I am continually amazed the by sheer quantity of logistics.  Many of the agenda items at the meeting had to do with the flow of information about things like who handed in money for field trips, budgets, and schedules, who is showing up and who is should and shouldn't be in class, substitution folders and when subs might or might not need computers.

Stuart talked about the possible shifts in the master schedule, which Alice, the vice principal, had been working dutifully on for most of the summer.  Part of the problem was that we still didn't have all of the staff required for the classes they were planning to teach.  Four teachers were still outstanding, waiting to be hired, and that meant that the final class schedule couldn't be finalized.  One of the teacher's they were waiting for was the drug and alcohol teacher, whose job was to coordinate the substance abuse curriculum which was going to be implemented by, among other people, me and Laura.  Jennifer, a science teacher, commented that she didn't feel she needed any more training, and then the guidance counselor said, and I quote: "You shouldn't have to do anything at all with that."  Meaning: you will be implementing the curriculum, but you shouldn't have to do any planning or thinking about the curriculum.  That it was the drug and alcohol teacher's responsibility to do all the planning and copying etc.  Which means that the underlying assumption is that the teacher is a kind of thoughtless implementer of something given by an outsider.  A non-thinker.

Phew.  That was disturbing.

Then we shifted to the bulk of the meeting, which was about bullying and harassment.  We did this exercise where we wrote down all the possible behaviors we could think of re: bullying and harrassment, and then categorized them according to things we would ignore (not much), things we would politely interrupt, and things we would refer to the principal or guidance counselor.  There is apparently an epidemic, district wide re: the whole "that's so gay" thing.  Anyway, there was a long discussion about it.

Afterwards I asked the GC if Edison had a GSA, and she said no: "Wanna start one?"  I said I'd be more than willing to help, but that I was a student teacher and wasn't sure what role it was responsible for me to play.

Then I read some student work, sat in on a few minutes of technology committee meeting.

Oh, and I spent much of the afternoon breaking both of the photocopiers at the school.

Enough.  I'm done for today.