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Do as I do, Not as I say...

The majority of our staff had high hopes for how the school year would run under the new administrative changes. We seem to have gotten off on a good foot for the first few weeks, but now that we're settling into the first full month, I'm beginning to wonder if all the decisions we made as a staff were just to placate one another into thinking we did have a say.

There have been many times where a co-worker has addressed an issue with a new policy only to get a response that indicates that the administration had not planned for that specific scenario. Case in point: We added in-school suspension to our discipline policy but because of the reluctance of the school board to hire someone to monitor it, the duty is passed around to a handful of teachers. Students who are immediately put in the in-school suspension room often don't have work for their classes that have not met yet that day, and so those of us who have them later in the day are sent scrambling trying to put something together for them to do while they are in in-school suspension.

The duties of these teachers also cover the monitoring of students who are sent out of class for sleeping. Teachers would need to send students out of their classes but did not know where to send them.

Yesterday, I learned from a co-worker that another colleague had a conflict with our new head administrator. The teacher in question has the same policy as I about students being in their seats when the tardy bell rings: If a student is not sitting in his or her chair but wandering about the room, we count them as tardy. This teacher also gives students a tardy if a student must go to his or her locker to get a textbook or pencil because he or she came to class unprepared. It was preached to us at the beginning of the year to have some sort of plan in place to encourage students to come to class prepared and encourage them to modify the lackadaisical behavior of the last few years. My policy is that they may go to their locker to retrieve the item, but they must serve five minutes with me either before or after school. Apparently, the other teacher has been reporting a large number of tardies because of students not coming to class prepared or for being out of their seat when the bell rings. The principal wanted to know what could be done to cut down on the number. The teacher explained that the policy is written in her syllabus and she was under the impression that we were to deter this sort of behavior. After a lengthy discussion, the principal backed off.

Also yesterday, we were told we needed to cut down on the number of out-of-town workshops we attend. I'm slightly confused here: If we're to find new ways of prepping our students and teaching our students, how are we to do it without workshops? If we're told that we need to find ways of deterring lazy behavior in our students, how are we do this when the principal tells us to find these ways but then requests that we change them?

The Purple Marking Pen

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Do as I do, Not as I say...

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