Teacher of the Year

Today was the first day of in service for the year, and i spent the morning listening to last years State Teacher of the Year (from my county) and the 1998 National Teacher of the Year. Now I don't want to say it's dumb, but good Lord, they were two of the most boring speakers I have ever had the dis-pleasure of listening to. They pretty much said everything I never needed to know about nothing (exciting I know).

Then i was really blown away by the afternoon meetings. The topic of discussion for about an hour was homeroom, which they have never had in the area. So I spent an hour listening to how a homeroom teacher is like a pseudo parent for each of the kids in the homeroom. So when they get in trouble, you must also be on their case about it....now the only problem I have with this was nothing got accomplished because 2 teachers felt these 10 minutes were the biggest drain on educational time ever. A good idea other than when the 10 minutes used for homeroom were added to the school day, so there are still 4 blocks of 90 minutes for teaching.

The idea of 90 minutes gave me another chuckle today. The teacher of the year from the district had a big chunk of their talk focused on how the attention span of a person is equal to their age until 20 but the maximum attention span of anybody is 20 minutes...but her home district is using 90 minute classes...I found that funny, but maybe I'm wrong.

Cheers