Meetings meetings meetings. Last week, out of a 4 day week at school, I had a meeting immediately after classes 3 days in a row. The only meeting-free day was Friday. Consequently, I had to postpone a whole pile of detentions, tutoring, and other stuff until then, when nobody in their right mind actually wants to stay after school. Highly annoying. Tomorrow, I get to go to the king of all time-wasting meetings: my district pre-intern program 3.5 hour afterschool bullshit. I have to do this 5 Mondays in a row, until the end of the semester, so they can give me test prep (likely doled out by some district hack with a cal state dominguez hills degree in adult education) on taking the secondary social studies content exam. I think of all the things that I could use assistance on in the teaching realm, social studies content is not one of them. Frankly, I've only found about one of the formal professional development sessions to be at all useful so far.... most of them refuse to treat teachers like reasonable professionals- making us do stupid icebreakers and draw posters like we were at RA training for college or something. I think i'm going to bring something to read and sit quietly in the back tomorrow.

Honestly it's pretty difficult to teach when all your after-school time gets sucked up with administrative garbage, and you have zero time to stay after to talk to kids who've been absent, or who haven't turned in their homework, or who are there every day paying attention but still think that Islam is a place. Speaking of which, about time to start grading my Islam final projects- grades are due Wed. and I have a stack of portfolios to look at. I'll post some of the more entertaining snippets.