Respite

Last week was hectic, what with the egg-scrounging, the opportunity and need to seriously question a District bigwig face-to-face, site politics, the general antics of overheated five year olds in Spring, and primary responsibility for pulling off the biggest community service/carnival-like event in our school's history.

So on Friday I cleaned the land snail terrarium, made sure the incubator's resevoir was filled, and took myself off to happy hour.

Monday is a District-wide PD day, which schools had planned themselves until being notified that SFUSD's Special Education plans and programs were found...mmm, wanting by auditors, requiring some immediate amelioration via staff training.

I am not sure what this training entails other than a survey, but if it's anything like previous training from student services, Special Education, etc., we will be hearing how we teachers have been doing the District wrong by failing to implement everything they tell us to.  The fact that they neither fund nor explain their mandates is, of course, the fault of front-line educators: if we were better teachers, we would simply intuit the District's needs.


I still have no idea what causes Central Office folk to become so quickly convinced that their teachers are incompetent fools who live only to make the wise, gentle, kind sages at the District Office look bad to outside auditors, but they do.  One would think that explanation by dedicated frontliners about the impossibility of putting certain District mandates into practice would have an effect, but recent experience tells me that they actually just interrupt said educators to talk about how when they were sadly still at school sites, they made it happen so why can't we?  That test score data and the ongoing audit failure suggests that these memories are perhaps rose-colored has no effect.

On the other hand, there are few things as awesome as the upper-level administrator who has realized that appealing to the on-site administration for help corralling an assertive staff into silence will not provide any assistance.  We have the on-site people trained.

Anyway, after Monday my Resident is soloing for two weeks: it will be assessment, prep for next year, and copying for me.  Something of a break, you see?