This past Friday I arrived home at 4:30 after attending an after school meeting. I had three e-mails in my box from our Assistant Principal. As I read each one it seemed to get me in a worse mood. One of them was about not turning in paperwork which I did. He acknoledged that it his return e-mail.
However, what really bothered me was that we were mandated to have a committee meeting on Monday when in the past the times have been left up to the chairs. I was purposely not having a meeting since I wanted to give our people a chance to grade with interims due on Weds. When I asked can we hold them whenever we want like the past, I did not get a nice reply. After that response I told him that I would have the meeting on Monday and sent out a letter to the team members.
I was then asked to meet with him at 6:30AM on Monday. During this conference he told me that only three people complained about the e-mails, one of them was me. He then told me when he asked two of the younger people to do things they just jumped with enthusiasm at his requests. He also mentioned that I was contractually obligated to attend these meetings every week.
During the day, I was amazed at how many people were really upset about the e-mails. There were literally teachers cussing in the halls, resenting the meetings and appalled by his e-mails. What was once only me now turn into a nice portion of the staff. So instead of using our responses as a gauge of the staff, reflecting upon his own poor judgement, he decided that I was the problem.
In a prior life, I dealt with customer relations. When you received one customer concern you realized that 11 people had the same concern but for whatever reason they did not bother to call. We were trained to trip over ourselves to make sure that this customer was appreciated, and won over. In education, I guess we do the opposite, we shoot the messenger.
So we spent the weekend, totally killing morale in the building.
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