(Not) Just another faculty meeting

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Classroom Humor Chatboard

(Not) Just another faculty meeting

by Dana Dunnan

Nov 19, 2013

Not all meetings are soul-numbing, and faculty meetings could sometimes be interesting. But it didn’t help that they would come at the end of the day. Usually, they would be in the library, where the late day sun streaming in had a soporific effect on participants. As did the sonorous tones of most principals. Worse, they would sometimes want to demonstrate that they had been to a conference, or actually done some professional reading. This would be readily evident once they used a “magic word”. These were buzzwords that were intended to show that they were very familiar with the cutting edge of educational innovation. To fully display their magic, these words would need to be repeated numerous times in the course of a single meeting. It became tradition to start counting number of usages in a meeting once any word was used more than once. There may have been some wagering involved. Richards, a former typing teacher who had worked his way into the principal’s position, had tend...See MoreNot all meetings are soul-numbing, and faculty meetings could sometimes be interesting. But it didn’t help that they would come at the end of the day. Usually, they would be in the library, where the late day sun streaming in had a soporific effect on participants. As did the sonorous tones of most principals. Worse, they would sometimes want to demonstrate that they had been to a conference, or actually done some professional reading. This would be readily evident once they used a “magic word”. These were buzzwords that were intended to show that they were very familiar with the cutting edge of educational innovation. To fully display their magic, these words would need to be repeated numerous times in the course of a single meeting. It became tradition to start counting number of usages in a meeting once any word was used more than once. There may have been some wagering involved. Richards, a former typing teacher who had worked his way into the principal’s position, had tended to obsess over the magic word “technology.” I remember sitting next to a young teacher who had just been told that he was being laid off. Richards commented on how unfortunate that staff would have to be reduced. But he brightened considerably when he described how the new copy machines we would be getting would be a huge step forward for the school. This was little consolation to the competent math teacher sitting next to me at the time, facing unemployment. Tony was a brilliant, intense English teacher. He also was more interesting than most of my colleagues. He would be the first male teacher at Masco to get an ear pierced, although he never drew any attention to it. He particularly avoided drawing attention to his interest in the paranormal. He shared with me, however, that he used to do hypnosis for MUFON, to gather information from people who might have been abducted by aliens. I was grateful that Tony was on the faculty, because he was very demanding of his students, which kept me from being a singular lightning rod. Tony would get to school before most of our colleagues, and buckle down to work at his desk. He was demanding of himself, as well as his students. Ironically, although Tony was willing to put in extra hours in the morning, the contractual end of the school day was sacred to him. Faculty meetings could drone on far past the contractually allowed time, but Tony would get up at the precise second and walk out. All of his colleagues were grateful for this, since it did serve as a signal to the principal that a torture session was over. This meant we could escape the long-winded laments of Alvin, the Social Studies teacher for whom whining was as autonomic as breathing. Alvin would stand up in the meetings and begin his recitation of a perceived injustice with a lengthy “Steeeeeeeeeeeeve……………..” We always hoped he would keel over from a lack of oxygen at that point, but he seemed to have some sort of rebreathing technique to sustain him. But I digress. So, one day, when Richards had been succeeded by Steve Jones as principal, we arrived before the meeting to see a workman leaving after having installed a new system intended to detect the theft of books, or magazines, or, once a year, the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated. (When they ran their first ever topless model, it was out the door in a nanosecond.) The head librarian at the time was young, and pretty hip. (At Masco, this was not a high bar to get over.) She proudly showed us how the bar inserted into a book could be demagnetized at checkout, and students would exit through a metal detector without setting off a shrieking alarm. Andy was probably the person who first saw the potential this represented. We hatched a plan, and the librarian gleefully agreed to participate. When Tony came in, the librarian indicated that she had some new books to show him. While she took him off into the stacks, Andy grabbed Tony’s briefcase and hid one of the new security rods within it. Then we sat back and waited. Word spread through the faculty as the meeting proceeded. One could tell someone had just received the word when an individual rose up out of their normal slouch, looked over at Tony and grinned broadly. Perhaps Alvin was not there, but as the contractual witching hour approached, the unexpected happened. It appeared that Steve was going to wind things up early, and let us leave well before the time when Tony would make his very public stage exit. Just as Steve was about to dismiss us, I leapt to my feet. “Steve, how can we interface the new technology with our curriculum?” As Steve began to launch into a stem-winding answer, sighs of relief were audible. Some may actually have been gasps at my having executed an elusive triple magic word score. Eyes shifted from the clock, to Tony, and back, again as the magic moment approached. On the second, Tony stood up. People moved to the edge of their seats as he approached the metal detector. Then he passed through it. And nothing happened. Steve looked puzzled as groans arose from all parts of the room. Tony looked back over his shoulder, equally puzzled, but never broke stride as he raced out the door. I turned to the head librarian, threw up my hands and exclaimed “Suppose he’d been a terrorist!” This time, colleagues followed Tony’s lead and got up and headed out the door, looking greatly disappointed. Faced with the exodus, Steve quickly wrapped things up and dismissed the meeting. Attendance was way up at the next faculty meeting. ________________________________________

This is an excerpt from Notes to a New Teacher, which is described extensively at [link removed]

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