The Christmas holidays are over and it’s time to start work again. Instead of just jumping right into teaching, our school held a study day for its teachers (students had an extra day off).
We have a new school plan in which the school’s vision and issues we are going to focus on are being discussed. So on our study day we had to open our creative minds and come up with specific and concrete ideas on how to implement this vision and accompanying focal points in our daily practice.
For some reason our administrators are not able to set this up themselves and they always hire someone – some kind of educational consultant – to guide us through the process. I’m allergic to those people.
Yesterday we had a guy that was wearing an awful shirt (did he look at himself in the mirror and thought Wow, this is a great shirt and it makes me look intelligent and powerful? I hope not). These consultants are always people who have been teachers in the past, but because they were just incompetent for some reason decided to do something different and something that makes them more money than if they would’ve remained a teacher.
He started talking about visiting schools in China and how they always do morning gymnastics there before school starts and about his own partaking in Chinese martial arts. Right then I knew we would soon be called upon to stand up and start doing some ridiculous exercises; so predictable. So, when he told all of us to stand, I stayed seated. I’m a rebel. As the majority of my colleagues were swinging their arms and legs, rotating their hips, bending their knees, I was wondering whether Ugly Shirt would come home that day, kiss his wife and say: “I did it again, sweetheart. They were all doing these ridiculous exercises just because I told them to! Isn’t that hilarious?”
This pin should be mine.
Then we got some exercises on creative thinking: drawing a table, talking for five minutes about a subject without pausing (The Windtunnel he called this technique), doing the Stroop Effect test, etc. etc.
I don’t understand why our administrators need to hire an expensive guy with an ugly shirt to do these things. Aren’t they creative enough themselves? The waste of money bothers me, because every time you – as a teacher – ask for money for a project or teaching materials, they’re always being so difficult about it. Why should this money go to Ugly Shirt when it’s so much better spent on our students? It just makes me want to rebel some more!