After-school special

I'm done with jokes about the term in-service. It's just odd, not funny. What happens on those days can be either or both.

Most of the comedy and oddity come from the meetings, of course. I'm not going on about my distaste for such things any longer either. End of year in-service is always the best because it is followed by vacation. I think all jobs should have a couple of days of preparation for vacation. I need practice on all kinds of things. Like reading a book, or sleeping. Unfortunately, even though school is over, these people insist on talking about school type things, like policy and professional development. The only thing I feel like developing at this time is a tan.

Nonetheless, the day started with some news updates, mostly relating to the upcoming merger with a middle school, which, while it certainly had merit as a school, was founded by a rich guy primarily with the goal damaging, or at least teaching a lesson to, our school. Like most things undertaken because of spite, it didn't work out so great, at least in the realm of being financially successful enough to continue to exist long-term. Understand that I am writing about this from a position that could best be described as total ignorance. This, of course, is my favorite position from which to expound, because I'm untethered by pesky things like facts. In any event, the merger of the school has seemed like a necessity for years and it's nice to have the uncertainty over with.

Merging with a middle school necessarily brings a significant increase in the number of middle school students in our school. This requires more classrooms and related facilities, and the next to talk was the Board volunteer who is overseeing the renovations to our building, which has plenty of room for the growth, but needs a partial tear-out and rebuild to become useful as a school.

I don't want to dump on this person, because I like her a lot and respect and appreciate the energy and time that she gives to the school. But about halfway through her presentation, she started talking about the necessary realignment of the faculty offices. At this point, she violated the Second Prime Directive of presentations, which is to have your facts straight and accessible. In so violating these principles, she made a series of about a dozen statements, each of which contained at least one factual error.

My advice for future presenters on this topic is that you go in knowing (1) where the people who are moving are currently located, and (2) where they are moving to. If you do not have these two sets of data, I would suggest putting off your presentation until you do, or you might experience what happened here. First, people start asking questions. If you then answer these without command of the facts, you will undoubtably give an incorrect answer which will not soothe matters. Despite more than one person's urging to stop the presentation until the information had all been straightened out and for reasons that I do not quite understand, we kept going, with mis and contradictory information flying everywhere. If you tell people they are moving and yet are not sure either where they are moving from or to, they will get upset. And if they get upset at you, you may react in kind.

The end result was that after about 10 minutes of this, we found ourselves being chided and scolded for not being cooperative, when what we mostly wanted was to know what it was we were supposed to be cooperating with. Bad meeting.

I think stuff happened after that, but the momentum was lost. It's a testament to how much everyone appreciates what the board volunteer is doing for the school that everyone was more sympathetic than angry about the whole thing. And it did get straightened out in short order- like most things in life, the problems seemed to have more to do with sorting out Post-it notes than anything else.

Later in the day, we had another meeting, which, while on a topic of utmost concern to people, broke the First Prime Directive of leading meetings, which is to actually lead the meeting.

My advice (and I know that's why you read this, to get advice from me, so read on) is twofold.

1. If you bring up a topic, do not move onto the next topic until that one is concluded, otherwise, you leave things open-ended, which is seldom the desired result and which will then muddle any subsequent discussion. We are a discoursive group, which if it isn't a word certainly should be, and if we having discourse on more than one topic at any give time, it gets untidy.

2. If there is a discussion going on, try to make sure the people are at least discussing the same thing. Aside from the confusion inherent in having 4 people discussing 4 different, though related, things is that digressions happen exponentially (hah! knew I could bring math in here somehow!). IOW, if one person digresses, you're now talking about 2 different things. If those two people digress, you're now talking about 4 different things. And of course, the 4 different things is where we started. By the time we were done with 8 and closing in on 16, I got up and left.