Conspiracy? Idiocy? You be the judge...

Today reached a new level of insanity for me. It was the last day of pre-planning, and we were all stuck in a staff development seminar about writing across the curriculum. As the writing teacher, I wasn't all that wowed by the presentation, but whatever.

Where the day starts to veer towards the ridiculous is right before lunch when someone asked me if I was going to the middle school orientation. Um.... WHAT middle school orientation? No one had told me anything about any orientation hoo-ha. So the middle school teachers started asking questions, real fast-like, since we had not been anticipating having anyone in our rooms while we were not there. Turns out that yes, indeed, there WAS going to be an orientation held by the assistant principal....but we didn't have to be there. In fact, we were not ALLOWED to be there because we needed to be at the vital professional development seminar.

So we have no idea what was said at said middle school orientation. We were not even introduced to the parents and new students and then sent on our merry cross-curricular-writing way. But since the orientation was held in one of the main building rooms rather than in the mods (where the middle school classrooms are), all the parents and kids had to walk through our staff development meeting in order to get to the room. And some of them saw the pizza we were being given for our lunch and decided it was there for them. So they started helping themselves to our food. Awesome.

I personally felt like it was a slap in the face to the middle school teachers. It was bad enough that we weren't informed of the event, but then to force us out of it entirely. . . it left a bad taste in my mouth. Furthermore most of us were fairly casually dressed (like shorts and t-shirts) since none of us had any idea that we would be seeing parents and students. Nice first impression that made, I'm sure. Plus we just had talked about how important it is to communicate and boom--this happens the next day. It's hard to remain hopeful that things will be better this year when it starts off this way.

It would have been so easy to say to us, "Hey, we're sorry we didn't invite you. Why don't you stay for the first few minutes at least and we'll introduce you." It would have been so easy for us to stay for the entire meeting. It would have been so easy to send us an e-mail informing us of the meeting in the first place. All these things just ate at me the entire drive home.