Beginning of Year Frustrations: Big Picture vs. The Here and Now

I'm on my third teacher workday as I write this. Across those three days, I've had only 3 hours unscheduled and right now I want to throw things. The rest has been inefficient meetings, sixty percent of which were unnecessary or inapplicable to my job description.

Par for the course for educator life in the twenty-first century. Teacher workday? Ha! That implies the teachers get to work. I'd call these what they are: mind-deadening meeting days.

See, kids are coming on Monday. And kids are the only reason I show up, so they are the only part I give a fig about being prepared for.

Being prepared for the kids means having my tech hooked up and functional, the room arranged, the displays in place, my systems thought out and organized, the lessons planned, the copies made.

Until all of that is in place--until I know that the here and now will function logistically--I couldn't care less about the big picture.

Upcoming initiatives from the school district, teacher evaluation systems, dress code, team building, and vertical alignment all matter . . . but not as much as being ready for day one on the ground.

So, I'm sitting in meetings about the big picture instead of working. Many of these conversations matter, but since I'm feeling under the gun, I attend with an unwilling heart, watching the clock and praying for the internet to go down so they'll have to cancel the meeting and I can go set up my chairs. I feel hamstrung before I've even begun, forced to fit a week's worth of work into four or five unscheduled hours, or give up my personal life entirely.

I work hard at protecting my personal time, making sure that I allow adequate nonworking hours to handle the business of life and get some rest and enjoyment out of life. So, I'm not willing to stay until eight o'clock each night to have time for the work I should have been handling during work hours. I'm not willing to come in on Saturday even if my principal agrees to unlock the building so we can do all the work we weren't allowed time to do on the teacher workdays because we were too busy talking theory instead of handling practicalities.

Then there's the nonsensical decisions districts make . . .like buying me a big television to use instead of a smartboard, but not providing a monitor that can support the proper resolution or providing any kind of presentation mouse that makes it possible to teach using a TV instead of a touchscreen without isolating myself behind a desk during class. Have they ever met a middle schooler? I can't sit behind a desk and teach them.

So, I can choose to buy all the things they don't provide, or deal with a shoddy system that makes it difficult to handle basic tasks like sending an email to the office that isn't projected for the entire room to see. I get so tired of working with cast-offs and incomplete systems on furniture that leans downhill on one side and is the wrong height for either the kids or the adults.

Then there's the information I don't have, like who in my classes has an IEP, 504, health plan or other concern. If this year goes like other years, I'll have already failed to comply with several IEP plans for two or three weeks before I find out that the plans exist.

Yep, I'm standing on the peak of Mt. Frustration again.

So, if anyone asked how to make this better, what would I do about it?

1. Manageable workload: Part of the reason I am so impatient to get to the day-to-day logistical work is because there's a metric ton of it and only 90 non-supervisory minutes a day once school starts.

If my workload was something more humanly attainable, I could spare time to talk philosophy without it meaning that my students will have to set up their own furniture on the first day of class because I didn't have time to.

Don't make teachers choose between being prepared and their health. Make the workload tenable.

2. Consider whether a meeting is the best way to handle information flow: Large group is a

terrible format for discussion.

If there are more than ten people in the room, someone is not being heard. The environment is chaotic and full of sidebars that the rest of the room doesn't benefit from.

So, what you're really having is a presentation following by a Q&A involving only the most extroverted people in the room.

If you want a discussion, you'll have to do it in smaller groups. If you don't want a discussion, then why are we all in the room together when you could just send us a presentation or video to watch? We would be called on the carpet if we did this to the students.

3. Value efficiency: A good meeting has a focused agenda so it's possible to accomplish the task in the allotted time.

A good facilitator doesn't not waste the time of the people in the room who could be getting other work accomplished if they weren't required to sit there.

Make sure you don't require people to be there if their input is not needed. That wastes their time.

Remember the twenty minute attention span limit of most adult humans. If your meeting is longer than that, we're not really focused anymore, so our time is being wasted.

Brevity is the soul of wit. Inefficient meetings are its death.

4. Order of operations: Teachers are highly autonomous workers.

We have to be.

90% of what we do in any given day is witnessed only by the children. We know HOW to do this work in the best way for each of us, including what needs to be done first, second, and so on.

I would require that at least the first two teacher workdays be completely meeting free, with all our district support staff and experts (tech department, curriculum experts, etc.) available to be called up on as needed. Protect teacher workdays as time on which teachers do the work. Tell us ahead of time how much time we'll actually have. We're incredibly efficient at fitting an inordinate amount of work in a short time frame.

We have to be. That's usually all we get.

Give me time first  for what I consider top priority and then I'll be much more patient with what your top priorities are.

Thanks for coming to my rant. Tune in next week for the next chapter of "When I'm made Queen."