Staff Development

“I hope I die during an inservice, because the transition from life to death is more subtle.” - Anonymous (but obviously a teacher)

I actually wrote most of this chapter while attending an inservice.

I often wonder why I bothered going to college to get a teaching degree. Every year I have to sit and listen to someone tell me how to do my job when I could be spending that time actually doing my job.
I guess they didn’t teach me how to be a teacher at teacher school.
Maybe I should ask for a refund?

Actually, I do understand why we have to go to these “trainings”. As with any profession it is important to stay current in the latest strategies and as Bo Schembechler, the legendary football coach at the University of Michigan, once said, “You are either getting better or you’re getting left behind.” But understanding does not make it any less painful. A lot of times staff development feels like your sitting in Ferris Beuller’s economics class.....anyone…..anyone.

Staff development inservices often remind me of the fishing trips my neighbor and I used to take while growing up in Inola, Oklahoma. We would get off of the school bus and say “meet me in the front yard in five minutes”, run into the house, drop our books, grab our fishing poles and tackle boxes and head for a nearby pond. We could go in just about any direction and be fishing in 15 minutes.

Sometimes the fishing trips were great. We caught lots of fish. Sometimes the trip wasn’t as productive but we still had a good time just hanging out together and enjoying the day. Then there were the trips that nothing seemed to go right. Broken poles, lost wallets, caught in the rain or stepped in manure on the way to the pond.

After teaching for a few years and having to attend “staff development”, I began to realize that it was a lot like those high school fishing trips. Sometimes it was a great experience. I caught a lot of great ideas that I could use instantly in my class. Some were just big steaming piles of manure.

One thing I’ve noticed about manure, having stepped in a lot of it over the years. Every pile of manure contains a little seed. We would pass by one of those piles a few weeks later on a different fishing trip and the grass where that pile was would always be a little greener, having been enriched by the fertilizer and there might even be new plants growing there that were not originally there. A product of the seeds in the manure.

So I guess some good can come even out of the worst of things…….but I still don’t like having to step through all the bull-shit.