Meetings

Professional development today in the school district. The kids left half an hour ago. We will have meetings from 1-3. I have no idea what the meetings will be about and they never tell us in advance. Why should we show up prepared or anything?

My kids took a whole bunch of fake money from one of our math kits. Big wads of this bright green cash is appearing in 4th-grade lockers, bookbags, and tiny fists. "I didn't do nothing, Mr." "Oh, this is mine from home." Right. You have a bookbag full of pretend $100 bills....

We did a survey of the students and asked them questions like "Do you like liver?" and "How many times have you gone to the movies in the past month?" Their answers are so funny. The liver question was a slam dunk. No one likes liver and once the kids realize what it means to eat liver they just freak. "What do you mean, Mr? You can't eat that!" I concur.

Soon, I will be doing some of my favorite things: leaving the building, checking out the dollar stores, hanging with my daughter and wife, eating Indian food, and drinking some delicious adult beverages. First, I must get through some meetings. Blah. A funny story about meetings and their uselessness. I used to work in test development. One day my team had a meeting about questions for the upcoming test. Eight of us were sitting around a board table. Our scary team leader was in a tizzy about questions that weren't good enough or had not been entered into our Kafkaesque computer system. We are all talking in jargon. "The MS is three away from UXing on the DQ at 12/10 on the BX9er. Well my 10Key is hotboxing on the SEMJON 3400TIC at 3200." "No." "Yes, and we are 3 away from a total collapse of the TYCOJO 190." After 20 minutes of this one of us said, "I haven't understood anything for the last 10 minutes." I seconded. Everyone else but the team leader said the same. Team leader went ballistic. I never laughed so hard in all my life. Two morals of the story: Laughing at unstable team leaders will get you fired faster than you can say Jackie Robinson and meetings are useless.

Better get my pencil. Meetings are starting. Don't want to be late. Perhaps there's some cookies.