Trying to sign up for Friday’s
professional development courses at school is like trying to pull hairs out of
my head one at a time using broken tweezers – eventually I might be successful,
but the pain and nuisance far outweighs the benefits and results.
Honestly – one of the only
remaining options open is folk dancing.
Folk dancing. How the hell is
folk dancing going to help me teach? Am
I going to teach children to clog out parts of speech? “Clog
once for verbs, twice for nouns, and clog the shit out of the floor if you find
a prepositional phrase!”
Luckily I signed in early
and will be taking some courses that are a little bit more useful in my
classroom. But, it’s tricky business
signing up for these courses:
1. The first thing
I have to do is find something that interests me.
2. The second and
most important thing is determining who will be teaching the course.
Oh sure, these sessions are only about seventy-five
minutes long. If I don’t fall asleep, I
should be able to make it through three in a row. The problem is, though, if the presenter
totally sucks, the whole experience is shot.
I quickly determine what I won’t sign up for – anything taught
by the self-appointed, self-anointed tech guru whose catch phrase is “I don’t
know what’s wrong; this is SUPPOSED to work!”
Every single time she tries to show us something technical or
computer-based, it crashes and burns, and she has to claim it is technology
that has failed (not her lesson, knowledge, and/or ability).
Whenever we have to sit through one of her painful
presentations and she utters those magic words, “I don’t know what’s wrong;
this is SUPPOSED to work,” I yell out BINGO at the top of my lungs. Oh, now I know this is cruel. I know it’s mean and spiteful and completely
callous of me, but I just cannot stop myself from doing it. In deciding that I value both my life and my
job (I suspect she could probably snap my neck in half with a computer cable if
she so desired), I avoid all of her course offerings for the day.
Instead, I sign up for a course with a crazy drama
teacher who shares mutual political views on everything from free lunch to
hiring morons to teach in public schools (which happens more than any of us
would admit unless under oath or threat of death). I don’t know what she’s going to make us do,
but it has something to do with speaking and listening. Maybe we’ll have to give a speech. Maybe I’ll read this blog entry out loud.
All I know is this one course, course number two out of
the three that I must take Friday morning, will probably be the only one in
which I am not playing with ineffective tweezers. It may be the only one in which I do not want
to pluck my head bald out of absolute frustration and boredom. With any luck at all, the other two courses will
be equally tolerable.
If, however, you hear random clogging coming from the
hallways of the school during any of the sessions and the noise is coming from anywhere
that is NOT folk dancing, don’t worry – It’s just me having a meltdown and
searching for prepositional phrases with my proverbial wooden shoes.
