How to Duck Out of …, I Mean, How to Get the Most Out of Your School’s Faculty Meetings

How to Duck Out of …, I Mean, How to Get the Most Out of Your School’s Faculty Meetings

by Mark Lyons

Image by PDPics from Pixabay

SammySocks Etc. Blog - Comments and Observations from Someone Who Is a Retired Educator and the Father of Sammy of SammySocks Etc. Visit us at www.sammysocksetc.com.

            Here are a few suggestions about how to make the most of your regularly scheduled faculty meetings. Hey, they are already quite important, productive, and well worth every minute, but just in case, these might make the time you spend in the meetings a bit more constructive.

1. Bring along several baskets full of your family’s clean laundry. Sit in the back and fold the laundry during the meeting. Better yet, have some of your team members help. If you are feeling especially ambitious, bring an iron.
2. Tell your principal that you are having some difficulty with the new TEKS and could really use a faculty meeting that provides training on how to write lesson plans for the new TEKS. Volunteer your grade level to be the “guinea pigs” to write the lesson plans for, and it would probably be best to plan for five or six weeks so everyone gets the hang of it and all.
3. Volunteer to lead a session during a faculty meeting on grading student work so that everyone can be on the same page and use your students’ papers as grading work samples. Viola – all your papers are graded!
4. Suggest that as a part of one faculty meeting the staff works together and cleans all the equipment in the science lab and then add your dirty dishes from home to the mix.
5. Recommend that the staff use part of a faculty meeting to make sure the lit library is in good shape and that all the books have been reshelved properly. Then, right before the meeting, put all the lit library books that you haven’t reshelved in 6 months in the “To Be Reshelved” bin.
6. Someone is always cutting out stuff during a faculty meeting that they have had laminated. Distract them for a moment and add your laminated stuff to their pile. Then, after the meeting, distract them again and gather your perfectly cut out laminations.
7. When it’s your grade level’s turn to provide snacks for the meeting, or even when it’s not your turn, hang around the snack table, see what’s running low, and volunteer to go get more of it from the store just up the street. Leave and don’t come back. Later, tell them, “Oh, the store was out, too! I asked them to look in the back to see if there was anymore and they came back and said that there was no more. By then it was too late to come back to the meeting because it was already over.”
8. Pass out your income tax forms with all your receipts and have the staff fill it all out right down to licking the stamps on the return envelope. Tell everyone it’s a real-life math activity.
9. Fake cough a little bit, ask a teammate to take notes, excuse yourself, get that garden hose from the trunk of your car along with a bucket, sponge, and soap. Hook up the hose and wash your car. Wash your teammate’s car too, for good measure.
10. Bring your laptop to the meeting. Have two tabs open – 1 for taking notes of the meeting and the other open to what you really want to work on. At the start of the meeting, actually take notes so stuff shows up on your screen. Then go to the other tab and work on what you want to work on but be ready to switch back to the first screen of notes if anybody walks by.
11. Do the same as #10 above, but instead of having a tab for taking notes, have a photo of the district’s superintendent on the screen that you can switch to if anyone comes by and wonders what you are doing. You can tell them that you are responding to an email that the superintendent just sent you and flash the superintendent’s photo on the screen.
12. You need a few more signatures on that petition to fill all the potholes in front of your house. Slip the petition in with the faculty meeting sign-in sheets and there you are – the rest of your needed signatures!
13. Volunteer to get that file your principal needs from back in the office and just don’t come back. Later, explain that you looked and looked but couldn’t find it and you did come back but the meeting was over, and everyone was already gone.
14. Tell everyone at the start of the school day that you just went to the eye doctor for an examination. The eye doctor dilated your eyes really well and that you need to wear sunglasses all day, even during the faculty meeting. Sit in the back at the faculty meeting, prop yourself up real good with your sunglasses on, and take a nap. You will feel refreshed and ready to take on the world after the meeting and you wake up.

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