Teacher Inservice or Why God Invented Wine

Disclaimer: I don’t hate administrators. I hate what they’re required and taught to do to teachers. 

As the calendar turns a page today and heads into August, teachers are faced with the blood-curdling realization that the beginning of the school year is nigh. It’s not the summer-tanned faces of yet unfamiliar students that we dread. No, nor even their accompanying parents. It’s not the smell of school glue nor glare of freshly waxed floors. No. We love our students and the sanctuary of our classrooms. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t have become teachers.

That which we fear - the horrible reality for which no education methods class in college prepared us - the single reason that teachers loathe August: 

Mandatory days of teacher inservice.

Not even the promise of coffee and donuts eases the trepidation we feel when we anticipate the hours sitting on a hard folding chair in a gymnasium looking at Power Point presentations about topics that A) anyone with common sense could read or figure out on their own in a matter of minutes or B) we already know so well we could teach a class on it or C) is the same thing we heard last year but now has a new buzz-wordy name.

Sitting on those butt-numbing chairs is awful enough, but even worse are the activities that administrators plan to get us out of the chairs. If we walk into the gym and see posterboard taped to the walls around the gym we know we’re going to be handed post-it notes on which we will have to write anonymous ideas and stick to the various posters boasting headings like “biggest worries” and “best practice.” No one will ever read those ideas. They will not be discussed again until next year’s inservice when they will be called ‘new ideas.'

Worse than the post-it note round robin is the get-your-blood-moving exercise that is more commonly known as dancing. Witness the “Tooty Ta” - the most humiliating, demeaning, ridiculous thing forced upon grown-up professionals who have countless graduate degrees and years of experience:

Just let me keep sitting on the rock-hard folding chair in this freezing, over-air-conditioned (or sweltering hot un-air-conditioned) gym, please.

This year, the agenda for our inservice is written in Understanding By Design format which I find to be the most insidious, contrary-to-critical-thinking prescription for writing curriculum ever embraced by the education profession. I wanted to throw up when I read my welcome packet. This is a tactic administrators use to get us to accept them as one of us. They want to remind us that they, too, are teachers. See? They even still know how to write lesson plans. Yay for them.

Administrators, desperate to look busy enough to warrant their salaries, sit in their offices and plan ways to 1) keep us out of our classrooms on those inservice days and 2) make themselves look important and organized. They create acronyms for every single thing they can think of until we have no idea what they’re talking about anymore because if we have to ask what they’re talking about they’ll feel superior. This must be the reason for this practice because saying the words instead of the acronym really doesn't take more time or energy. For example: PLC = Professional Learning Community. Nanoseconds between ignorance and enlightenment.

If an acronym doesn't work (i.e.- when it's a single long word instead of a group of words), an abbreviation is used instead.

My least favorite but most commonly used abbreviation is “the cum folder.” Do administrators live such sheltered lives that they don’t know what cum is? I wouldn’t want to look in anyone’s cum folder, much less put something in or take something out of it. The effort to actually pronounce the word 'cumulative' would be greatly appreciated by all.

I could go on and on but I’ll still have to go to the inservice, which this year, since I work in two different districts, will require seven days of my life that I will never get back.

But I have a job and I’m getting paid, so I’ll go and nod and smile and then I’ll go home and put some alcohol on it.

And the next week I’ll get to teach!

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