As a teacher, I’ve been in a number of meetings. I’m fortunate to say that I can’t make a claim like, “Not a day goes by that I’m not in some meeting or another,” but I suppose that’s possible.

We have grade-level meetings every Friday. We sit around and talk about what’s going well with the logistics of our grade — moving from class to class, getting materials out of lockers, going to the bathroom, going to lunch, heading back from lunch, getting to related arts classes. All these things and a million more. We talk about students who are showing bad behavior in multiple classes and make a plan for dealing with the kid, hopefully with more positive outcomes for the kid than he is currently experiencing.

Working on math homework

Every Tuesday we have professional development. We learn about new websites, new methodologies, new laws, new tools, new books, new paradigms. We go over how to accommodate children with mental and behavioral challenges in ways that are productive and in accordance with the documentation (IEPs/504s) in place for them.

Lately, we’ve been learning about the new way the district requires us to write our lesson plans. It’s tempting to think that since the lesson plan is a tool primarily for the teacher that the district would allow a great deal of flexibility in this endeavor, but that would be a faulty assumption. Verbiage, formatting, pacing, sequencing — all of this is decided for us. And when the district decides that it wants to make a change to this or that element of our lesson plans, we, as far as I know, have little to no input into the changes and are simply told, “This is how you do it now.” Perhaps some select few teachers get to attend those meetings where such matters are decided, but I’ve never met anyone who’s had a sense of having any input into these issues.

On altering Wednesdays after school, we have faculty and department meetings. These usually just turn into information-dissemination sessions, and I’m sure many participants find themselves thinking, “If you could just give me this in writing, I can read it on my own time.” Sometimes department meetings provide professional development as well.

A frustrating moment

While sometimes there’s a distinct feeling in the room that everyone would like to be doing something else (planning lessons? assessing student work? recording grades?), many of these meetings are indeed helpful. A large organization has to have meetings.

Today, however, I attended a first in my meeting-strewn career: we had a meeting about upcoming meetings. A meta-meeting.