My Freakin' School is Wastin' My Freakin' Time!!!

AAaaaaaaaaarrrgghh!!

I had a school-wide faculty after-school meeting this week on Wednesday afternoon -- one that we were not notified we'd be having until Tuesday afternoon. (As if we don't have actual lives outside of this place.) And why?

Cause there was some really important stuff to go over. Like hall passes.

We literally spent 23 minutes discussing the proper implementation of granting hall passes. Which hall pass to assign. When they should be assigned. When they should not be assigned. How many of them can be assigned. How we are now supposed to keep track of who we are granting hall passes to so now, when a kid asks to use the restroom, we are supposed to stop everything we are doing, get out our "Accountability of the hall pass" sheet of paper, and note who took the pass so, in case someone absconds with the hall pass, we know who the last kid to have the hall pass was.

Because apparently, hall pass abduction is on the rise. And sophisticated classroom discussions on the theme of oppression throughout the ages as evidenced in a cross section of texts by international authors easily afford the opportunity to start-n-stop to do menial book-keeping like making sure that I note that Jenny took the hall pass because she is menstruating!!

AAaaaaaaaaarrrgghh!!

(But at least she's not pregnant... alas, I drift.)

Never mind the ditching on campus. Never mind the fire alarms being pulled. Never mind the graffiti, the truancy, the tardiness, the lack of homework, the immense need for more parental support, the fact that there's always a 15 minute line to use the faculty photocopier (when it's working) and on and on and on.

Hall passes are now a major concern and damn it, we are going to beat this problem... as a team!

It was practically a surreal experience for me, sitting through this hall pass certification training process. But trumping the fact that our admins were spending our precious planning/professional/life time so ludicrously was the shocking sight of seeing so many teachers with their hands up waiting to ask questions about hall passes once the admins had concluded their section of the day's preposterousness.

Will we be getting special hall passes for the nurse?
Are the library hall passes good for more than one student?
Can we color code the hall passes so that we know which department issued the hall pass?

Every time I think the admins are acting foolishly I look out to my peers and think, Aw Geesh, please put your hand down.

Am I the only one who knows that the golden rule of long, silly staff meeting is to NEVER raise your hand to ask a question because it only prolongs the pain?

BTW, school started six weeks ago, I have about 10,000 hours of work to do in terms of grading and lesson planning and trying to bring in a new unit on Body Language to tie to some oral presentations I want to have my students give later this month and we're talking about freakin' hall passes for 23 minutes well after 4:00 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon after I've been at school since before the light of day?

My Freakin' School is Wastin' My Freakin' Time!!!

AAaaaaaaaaarrrgghh!!

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Comment by Karen Maginnis on October 10, 2009 at 11:32am: Mr. Sitomer, you rock.

Comment by Sidney Sullivan on October 10, 2009 at 3:19pm: Alan Sitomer, you are a brave man. You also must have tenure...or either know that your admins do not / will not read your blog! I too dread faculty meetings, paperwork, and all of the red tape that zaps the creativity out of teachers. I try to attend these meetings, listen with one ear, and somehow attempt to use the rest of my brain to think about how to actively engage my students. Perhaps if they were more engaged (at all schools, not just yours) the hall pass wouldn't have such appeal, eh?

Comment by Alan Sitomer on October 10, 2009 at 10:32pm: I have n problem telling an admin to their face that 23 minutes to discuss the hall pass policy in a faculty meeting is nuts. The only reason I didn't do it then is cause I wouldda just added to the length of the meeting.

But no, fear does not, should not rule our relationship with admins and if they feel that the meeting was warranted should I call them out on it and they can defend it, I am all ears.

But really, it's just part of a bigger problem, one that they really do not have a handle on themselves. Actually, no one really does.

Comment by Eric on October 11, 2009 at 1:37pm: Our district wants to focus on technology this year, and unfortunately they chose a one size fits all approach. We all took a pre-test on Microsoft Office at the beginning of the year. I scored a 95. We all have to complete 6 hours of professional development, which consists of online pre-tests, lessons, and post-tests about individual MSOffice applications.

I tried to comply, really I did. I spent 10 minutes on the first pre-test, about Microsoft Word. I came to a question worded somewhat like this: "When using the Format Painter, how do you turn the Format Painter off?" I chose, "Click the Format Painter icon". The response was "Incorrect. To turn off the Format Painter, you can click the Format Painter icon or press Escape." Realizing I was going to have to answer 53 more questions like this, and then I would have to complete a lesson about how to turn the Format Painter off and on, and that at my district's encouragement I am using OpenOffice anyway, I logged out and solidified my resolve to not complete this mandated professional development.

Among the many things I despise about this form of PD, I hate that the district will certainly collect data that makes the PD seem useful. Everyone who completes the course will score higher on the post test than on the pre test. They will get data that says that teachers learned from the experience. When the data is presented at next year's opening inservice, I will stand up and ask, "Have you collected any evidence showing that this professional development has directly impacted any teacher's ability to teach better, or directly impacted any student's learning? Because about all I learned was how to turn off and turn on the Format Painter two different ways."

None of the colleagues I have spoken with, expert or novice in technology, are finding this meaningful. I believe it is our responsibility as professionals to refuse to participate in these meaningless excercises. If we are instead spending our time on meaningful work, and are prepared to articulate what we are doing that is meaningful, we can follow through on this refusal.

Comment by Eric on October 11, 2009 at 2:45pm: I'm not quite sure what you mean. I don't assess students in this manner, so they don't usually have this kind of objection. When they do raise these kinds of points, I look at the context with them. Is it in another class they are taking? Is it a required standardized test? I try to help students sort out which structures we have to accept for now, and which we can resist. If the choice is to resist a given structure, we are responsible for finding a meaningful way to resist.

I work in a small alternative high school. Most of our students have not been well served by the traditional education system. Many of them have recognized the meaningless or even harmful nature of much of what happens in schools, but have only found ways to resist that hurt themselves in the end. Much of our work is helping them find ways to re-engage in meaningful learning experiences.