Superteams

Going through an old notebook, I stumble on the superteam notes. A superteam is a team of teams. This notebook is a few years old. Last year, our superteam meetings were called building meetings. We all got together Wednesday afternoons and stayed late to have a meeting of the many people going to the many meetings. I had meetings all five days of the week. On Wednesdays, I usually had three separate meetings.

Eduhonesty: I am a natural talker and mostly I don’t mind meetings, but I will observe that the minimum I spent in meetings on a given week was usually about four hours. My meetings ran over five hours some weeks. On those weeks, I spent over one-seventh of my “official” school week in meetings. I sure hope we were having “super” team meetings given the amount of time we were NOT using to get ready to teach. We spent a great deal of time on theory and content for lesson planning, but very little time remained to actually get ready for class.

Eduhonesty: In fairness, I taught two different subjects and bilingual classes so I definitely had more meetings than the average bear. I think teachers of one subject may have been getting by with only a little over three hours worth of meetings sometimes. This confluence of meetings represents one more reason, though, why I might steer a colleague away from working with disadvantaged populations. I have had special-education colleagues tell me they spent over half their day in meetings regularly.  With all due respect for necessary records and paperwork, at the point where meetings need special names, we might start wondering if the proliferation of meetings is getting out of hand.