Foreboding

I know, if you looked at all my posts, most of them are of a whining nature, but we are a country of whiners...ask Phil Gramm...oh, you're not rich enough to talk to Phil Gramm. But I digress.

So, I guess I could start off with something more positive, like...uh...another beautiful sunset today.

OK, now that I got that out of the way...we're gonna have some problems at school. We had an official, yet unofficial meeting of all the teachers for the Charter school today. Not pretty.

Here's the deal. I'm sure I've talked about the structure of the school. There's the director and assistant director. Then there's Lead Teachers of each program within the school. Mark is the director, Gail is the Assistant Director and Dan is the Lead Teacher at my program (STEM). Gail & Dan live together. Where do they live? In an ohana behind Mark's house. Mark is their landlord. They're all nice people, but they're not administrators. Gail has no background in education. What basically happens is that the three of them make whatever decisions that need to be made then the results just show up one day in our day-to-day routine. In our meetings - where we're supposedly work as a team - we're given some lip service, but in the end it rolls their way.

In the beginning, it was pretty easy to get our ideas incorporated, but now it's gotten a lot tougher. Today, I was pretty much ignored. But I'll get to that later because there's another dynamic.

Dan comes from Florida. He went to one of the biggies...I think it was Florida State. One of his professors is this Dr. Jones chick. Well, now that he's here, they've gotten Dr. Jones involved in our program. She comes once a year to see how we're doing and make her benevolent suggestions. Peggy and Renee spent a lot of time collecting data on our kids over the last school year for her and Dr. Jones never bothered to look at it. So now she has all these other suggestions that deal with data gathering, blah, blah, blah. All these decisions are made in the summer which I guess I have to live with, but to be honest, I still haven't been given a lot of details about a lot of them. Oh yeah, school starts Monday.

Dr. Jones was on the island last week. I had the chance to meet her for maybe a total of 10 minutes and I got a really, really weird vibe between Jonesy, Dan & Gail. I mean, as a trio, they seemed...uh...really close. It was a bit on the creepy side.

So we had 48 kids last year. We add a grade and 2 teachers this year. And we have no idea what we're doing next week. Oh sure, there's vague shit. We have to give them surveys and test them in math and show them the rules, etc. But the actual 5W's...who, when, what, etc hasn't been decided. Every time we ask Dan he gives a "we'll work it out" or "no worries". Did I mention that school starts Monday?

I've only met the new teachers once and they seem...uh...new. But the deal with the other teachers (including me) is this: we're all really good teachers. We can pull lessons out of our ears at a moment's notice. We're all good with kids. But we're used to doing this alone, where we don't have to rely on other adults. You can't do that when you're sharing space like we are; where someone taking care of their stuff directly affects what happens with the other teachers. Dan's not good at either planning, communicating or delegating. That was THE frustrating thing about last year and it's going to be worse this year.

There was this weird day last school year where Peggy & I were talking about this upcoming year - how the day was going to go with 72 kids, 5 teachers, 2 vans, etc. I don't know how, but I had this Rainman moment where I worked it all out on the board. I copied it, digitized it and shared it. It sat around all summer. Today, Dan kept commenting on how we have to figure out what to do about PE and Art. I had that solved. I mentioned it once, it was promptly dismissed and moved on....followed by more comments about how we don't know what to do about PE and Art and that we're not sure what to do in the afternoons. My thing has it solved, but it's pretty much toast.

Pardon my language...it's going to be a clusterfuck. I'm going to get mine, educationally speaking, and get out of there. I have some great ideas, stuff I've always wanted to do. I'm going to give them a go, add to my portfolio and get out.