Goodbye Summer, Hello Boring Meetings

Today was the first day of the long week of teacher meetings. This is pure torture for everyone. We have to end our summer early, leave our kids at home the very last week of summer, and sit through long and boring meetings. The week before school is typically the busiest in a teacher's life. We try to get our classroom ready, label everything, make copies, etc. The torture comes when we are forced into a room where we cannot do any of these preparations before the students come to "Back to School Night" which is in two days. I am fortunate that my classroom is ready to go.

I had decided to bring some music books to the meeting today and browse through them while listening to the meeting. This didn't work out so well. I seem to always have the principal standing by me. Standing by a student is a discipline technique that I use quite often with my students. I have to admit that toward the end of the day it didn't matter if I had the principal right there or not, I openly looked through my books and even wished that I had my crossword puzzles.

The topic of today's meeting was Monday afternoon collaboration time. I don't even go to school on Mondays, or to collaboration time. I gave my advise to the other teachers and told them experiences that I had while teaching a regular class, but for the other 6 hours 50 minutes I was totally bored without a sudoku or crossword puzzle.