My past comes back to haunt me

People warned me about this, and they were right. I came to this school 10 years ago after 20 years of working in advertising and marketing, and though these topics continued to interest me in a passing manner, I wanted no part of any sort of professional conduct. In fact, one might say that unprofessional conduct is one of my specialties. But I digress (digression-related thought- I just had a physical and my doctor told me to get used to "age-appropriate memory loss." I wonder if age-appropriate digressiveness is a similar thing).

What this mean is that, no matter how many times the school has tried unsuccessfully to market itself effectively, I have steadfastly not gone beyond an annual offering of general assistance. This, now, has changed.

A couple of things have caused this, aside from the slow decline of the school's enrollment. First, there has finally been a directional change toward competent leadership. It's still at the stage where the most competent people are overwhelmed (as tends to be the lot of the competent), but at least there's a recognition that this is the case and a desire to improve it. Second, the school has (finally) agreed to merge with a competitive but financially disastrous middle school, creating a new entity.

What sent it over the edge for me, though was the most recent attempt at creating an effective marketing program for the new school. From the teachers' perspective, this meant that we were recruited for what was incorrectly announced as a "focus group" to talk to a market research professional about how to move forward.

What transpired was something that even the researcher said was not a focus group, but kind of a large-scale group interview. The content of the session, however, was not in any way satisfactory to the interviewees. The questions seemed off-base and not particularly useful, and it was regarded to be at best a waste of time and generally as an nothing more than an irritant.

In the past, when stuff like this has happened, I've just shook my head (yes, I know that's not grammatically correct) and gone back to teaching. But this time, for whatever reason, I decided to, and I shudder at the very phrase, get involved. No need to go through the details of how this happened, but next thing I know I'm directing things on behalf of the school. Not like I'm in charge, but I'm completely tied into the process.

On a certain level, this is highly stimulating. What's going on now is mostly the part of marketing that I like- information gathering and strategy development. On the other hand, now I've gotta call the building coordinator and book a conference rooms and coordinate having people sign up. That being stuff I don't like and am not particularly good at. Plus, I still have a huge range from which to choose my level of involvement. I don't really want to be responsible for anything.

But it's a journey, right? And it's always about the journey, not the destination. But considering this is my first time sticking my head out of the foxhole, it would be nice if it made a difference.