The turkey was done awhile ago

Saturday morning tutoring is cancelled. The teacher has professional development (PD). She will be busy from 8 to 3 today being developed. She’s been developed on embedding language learning into her lessons repeatedly, but a certain number of PD hours are demanded by the state. For the average teacher, 120 hours of PD are expected within the license cycle.

I am the teacher who is about to sacrifice her tutoring and leisure time to a PD that I have taken in a variety of forms before.

Eduhonesty: I view my PD obligations as one more set of good intentions run amok. Should I be improving myself? Definitely yes. Will this PD improve me? Possibly yes. Would my students be better served by my using this time to prepare clever lessons, identify student areas of weakness and catch up on homework grading? Almost certainly yes. For that matter, they might have been better served if I had not cancelled Saturday tutoring. I have been excruciatingly well-developed on the SIOP model for lesson planning and the Charlotte Danielson rubric in the last few years.

Can we stop now? If I wasn’t listening the last 50 times I heard about SIOP and Charlotte, I’m unlikely to start listening now. If I was listening, then I guarantee you I don’t need to hear the details again. This turkey has been marinated, basted, wood-fired, poached and deep fried. This turkey’s been cooked to jerky.

I’m sure this will be a good PD, but I’d rather go tutor my students, and buy them donuts and hot chocolate. When tutoring resumes, we are probably moving from McDonalds to Dunkin Donuts — the better to get my guys up on a Saturday morning.