Staff Meeting

Our school's fortnightly staff meeting is insufferable.

• Excluding AOB, there's 4 items on the agenda. P says she wanna finish at 4pm (we started at 2.15pm). Unfortunately, Her first item on 'pupil management' took us all the way to 4pm. It took 1 hour 25mins to finish item 1.1.2 on the agenda. The issue? Deciding when and in what situation should students be deemed as 'late'. In the end, the talk lead freaking nowhere. But that's ok, it's the norm anyway.
• We talked about punishment - P says we got to make sure children do not get hurt when we punish them, say when we ask them to do 10-20 pushups. This male teacher had the cheek to say angrily that he asked a student to do 50 pushups for misbehaviour, and therefore fully deserved it. The student was talking when he was asked to do his work. The teacher complained that he became outright defiant and refused to do the pushups properly. Hello?? What did he expect? I see a normal kid and a stupid teacher who knows nothing of child psychology.
• Then, he went on to complain that the teacher aides are not doing their work in keeping neighbouring classes quiet, and even personally attacked them by saying that they all look so soft and have no ability to do anything for the school. I mean, what the hell. It is the teachers who come late for lessons that give the students a chance to create havoc in the first place!
• The P and VP arranged for all the staff to take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, buying into the smoky 'learning technologies' of Adam Khoo. Supposedly, it will help us be better teachers. Hm. (Do read this interesting article on the Skeptic's Dictionary on MBTI)

I remember the last time, I was fighting to stay sober; today, I was trying hard not to voice out how stupid and pointless all the discussions are (as in, talk and talk but end up with no conclusions). The P keep asking for feedback, maybe I should tell her that the best thing in school will be for her to keep meetings to the point and punctual.