
As so many commentators on my last post noted, it's important that teachers come prepared for today's long day of professional development meetings.
Ms. Tsouris has a new cell phone so she can text message friends (just like her students!) and a magazine of crossword puzzles.
Miss Malarkey has a stash of sudoku puzzles in a professional looking binder and she says "Since my head will be down, no one will see me rolling my eyes...Perfect!"
Perfect indeed.
I have decided that I am going to be practicing some of the lessons I learned at a meditation workshop I took over the summer during today's professional development meetings.
Om...om...om...om...om...
I learned at my workshop that chanting om helps fill you with vigor and strength, keeps you from feeling depressed, and makes the mind serene.
Doesn't that sound nice?
Now I don't know if I am going to be able to keep the meditation up all year as I sit through school-wide meetings, departmental meetings, meetings on Kleinberg's new battery of ELA standardized tests, and various other professional development meetings.
But I am going to try.
After all, I think about 97% of the stuff covered at these things I have heard half a dozen times before and the other 3% could be imparted in about 5 minutes.
So how about you? What do you do to get through these PD meetings when you hear the same b.s. year-in, year-out that is so often devised by twenty-something Tweedies just out of grad school who have never worked a full slate of classes or assistant principals looking to cover their butts by parroting whatever the latest in-favor education themes at City Hall/Tweed are?