As I start to look back on 27 years of teaching, one thing I will never miss is meetings:
Endless, blessedly forgettable, oftentimes unnecessary meetings.
Goodbye meetings, and good riddance.
That said, I have a few more memorable moments from more than a quarter-century of meetings during my teaching career.
A few include:
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During my very first meeting, on my very first day as a teacher, two days before my first students would appear in my classroom, my principal asks a question about strategy for an upcoming event, and I raise my hand to offer my opinion.
About 12 minutes into my teaching career, I had something to say to the entire faculty about an event I had never attended and knew nothing about.
Then I feel a sharp pain in my shin. It’s my colleague, Donna Gosk, whom I don’t know at all yet but who will eventually become one of my greatest friends.
She had kicked me.
“Put your hand down for the next three months,” she whispers.
She was right.
More listening. Less speaking. The correct formula for a teacher who had yet to teach a single student on a single day of school.
A lesson I still carry with me today.
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Three years later, I’m sitting in another one of those August meetings in the library, two days before students return to school, when I look up and see a woman enter.
She’s beautiful. She’s smiling and chatting with a colleague. I don’t recognize her. She must be a new teacher to our school.
I can’t take my eyes off her.
I don’t know it yet, but she’s my future wife.
I first laid eyes on Elysha in an end-of-summer meeting in the library of Wolcott School.
Not every meeting is a waste of time.
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My former colleague and friend, Steve, explains to me before a meeting begins:
“I like to position myself so I can see how people react to what you say.”
“You’re serious?” I ask.
“Absolutely,” he says.
Apparently, I’m capable of saying things in meetings that spur interesting reactions from time to time.
In that same meeting, during a discussion about an especially contentious issue, my colleague and friend, Leah, says:
“I’d like to hear what Matt has to say about this.”
I was trying to avoid this topic altogether. I was keeping my head down and my mouth shut.
Now I have to state my opinion, and sadly, I am incapable of not speaking what i believe to be the truth, so I begin. I know my thoughts will not be well-received.
I look to Steve. He’s smiling.
I still don’t know if Steve and Leah were working together that day.
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Steve also points out that in meetings, I often make sounds that indicate my displeasure over what is being said.
I had no idea.
Others over the years will point this out as well.
When something annoys me, troubles me, or angers me, I apparently make small hamuphs, grunts, and other quiet yet audible sounds that indicate my frustration.
But for years, and perhaps still, I have been making my opinions known without any intention or awareness.
This explains a lot.
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At the end of our first late-August, before-school meeting, our new principal (a real monster) says, “Please be here tomorrow morning at eight,” at which point I quietly add, “Thirty.”
He says it a second time. “Don’t forget to be here at eight,” and once again, I say, “thirty,” just loud enough for my brand new colleague, Eric, to hear.
The next day, Eric walks into our meeting at 8:30 — half an hour late on his second day of work at our school.
The principal is displeased.
“I swear you said 8:30!” he protests.
I confess to my crime to Eric at lunch that day. I never tell the principal.
As I said, he was a real monster.
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Years ago, we are discussing the importance of confronting parents who enter the building and fail to check in at the office. My principal says, “If they don’t have a visitor badge, send them back to the office., We all need to be attentive and aggressive about this. Please be sure to stop these parents in the hallways whenever you see them.”
We have some especially egregious repeat offenders.
A colleague proposes posting signs informing parents to check in at the office to stop them from barreling down the hallways despite the many reminders we have already issued.
I say:
“I would ignore those signs. I ignore most signs. Signs only stop sheep, and sheep are not our problem. We are dealing with wolves. A stupid, little sign won’t stop a wolf.”
I think I’m clever.
Actually, I am. Also, I’m correct.
But I can see from the look on my colleague’s face that my words have not landed well, and I have made myself an enemy that day.
I didn’t realize it would be an enemy for life.
Also, no signage of the kind suggested is ever added to our school.
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I’m serving on a curriculum committee years ago. At the time, and perhaps today, our writing curriculum sucked, so we were attempting to forge something new and better so our students could become more proficient writers.
For the record, if the school district would simply purchase curriculum designed by professionals who are trained, skilled, and equipped to spend the time and money necessary creating high-quality instructional material for students, rather than a series of nested Google docs that are difficult to navigate, impossible to manage, constantly breaking, and worst of all, poorly designed and absent any actual material to assist teachers, none of these labor-intensive meetings would be required.
We could probably eliminate entire positions in our school district if we simply utilized the expertise of trained professionals and purchased well-designed curricula, rather than allowing hubris and short-term thinking to get in our way, leading administrators to believe we can do it better.
For the record, I have made these feelings clear to my administrators many, many times over the years:
Verbally, but also quite often in writing. I wouldn’t want you to think I’m suddenly finding gumption in my last weeks of teaching. I’ve been a constant critic and, at times, an irritant on this subject for years.
During one of these curriculum meetings, an assistant superintendent says she hopes to implement this new writing curriculum within the next two years.
“Two years?” I say. “We need it tomorrow!”
She explains to me that it takes a long time to steer a large ship in a new direction — like I haven’t heard this well-worn, excuse-laden aphorism before.
I remind this superintendent, who lives in our school district, that she sends her children to private school, so they aren’t trapped on our apparently slow-moving ship. I ask, “If your kids were trapped on our ship along with all the other public school kids, would you still be talking about how hard it is to turn a large boat?”
Then I add, “Don’t answer that. There is no good answer.”
A principal beside me (whom I barely know and don’t really like) pats me on the back and says, “I can’t believe you said that.”
I think I’ve made another enemy this day. Instead, that assistant superintendent will become anxious and overly attentive around me for years, often publicly seeking my opinion in a shockingly kind and solicitous way, to the point that colleagues across the district begin asking why she keeps checking in with me.
People are strange.
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During a faculty meeting in the years of our awful principal, I find myself writing a list of reasons why this man is a monster.
For the record, in my 27 years of teaching, I had only one bad principal, and he was with us for only four years before we managed to rid ourselves of him, thanks to the courage of a colleague who would not stand for indecency. For most of my career, I have been blessed with excellent principals — Plato Karafelis and Scott Dunn — with one additional year split between Maureen Lantner and Lynn Katz, who were also excellent.
But for four long years, we suffered under the leadership of a real narcissist and loser.
Once I finished my list about him, I passed it around the table to my colleagues, who laughed at my jokes.
So I wrote another one about how idiots ruin meetings.
More laughs.
So this became my way of surviving meetings and professional development while being forced to listen to this man:
My writing amusing lists about him and administrators in general.
Then one day, I write an amusing list that isn’t about our principal. It also gets laughs. So that becomes my coping mechanism:
Lists that make me and my friends laugh. The topics range from socks to Gummy Bears.
About a month later, I write a list, but as it lands in my friend Amy’s hands, she points to it and then to me with a quizzical look on her face.
I get it:
The list is funny, but it’s not something I would ever say or think. It comes from the mind of someone underconfident, anxious, uncertain, and maybe even a little afraid.
I am none of these things.
In that moment, staring at Amy’s confused face, I realized that a character of sorts had appeared in my mind and taken over the lists. Like all of my novels, a voice has appeared in my mind, fully formed, and he is now in charge.
So begins a series of lists that will eventually become my novel, “Twenty-One Truths About Love,” which Charlie is reading right now. It’s a book composed solely of lists, written by an obsessive list-maker, that tells the story of this man and his struggles with marriage, finances, sex, family planning, and his new business.
Crazy. Right?
Lists designed to amuse me and my friends because a terrible man was making our lives miserable eventually became something I sell to my publisher, St. Martin’s Press. It’s eventually published in a dozen countries in addition to the United States.
It’s a book that allows Elysha to remain home with our kids for another year or two.
As I said, not all meetings are a waste of time. Those meetings turned out to be especially profitable.
Still, I’ll be happy to be done with them when I retire.
Retirement is bittersweet, but some things are only sweet.
