Short week. Headed to SC to see oldest receive award at fancy gala👩🏼🏫🎩. Much to do next 2 days.
Ten years from now, the above sentence will be what the written word will have devolved to thanks to Twitter and texting. Adjectives and adverbs will have been completely replaced with emojis by 2025. 😫
But seriously, this will be a short week. I will have two days of manic activity at the office so I can spend the rest of the week visiting with my daughter down in Columbia. Funny story. Last year, she won the Teacher of the Year award for her school, then followed that up with a TOY award for her district. Pam and I attended the awards banquet where that second honor was bestowed and it came as a shock to all of us. It was quite an honor to win such an award after only four years in the teacher business. A year has passed. Her duties as TOY have been quite extensive, and oddly, they have just begun. You see, in the education business, everything is counterintuitive. Educrats are a breed apart. Apparently, when you win a TOY award, your "term" lasts for three years. The first year you're essentially a TOY in training. This entails adding roughly three hours a day to your normal ten hour work day doing education-y things which have nothing to do with teaching. The second year, you actually serve as the TOY, which as far as I can tell involves making several unpaid speeches and serving on a dozen unpaid committees. Finally, year three arrives and with it the coveted title, Teacher of the Year Emeritas, another unpaid position, whereby you help train the poor sap who has been selected as that year's TOY. As you can see, this title is quite the honor, and quite the boon for the district central office since it's like they gain a new part time unpaid employee for three years! I say unpaid, when actually that isn't true. I am told that this weekend Kaitlin will finally receive her TOY stipend...a check for a thousand dollars, which by my rough calculations works out to about $3.14 an hour for the extra work she has inherited since her big "win." When she recently learned that she had fallen just short of being a finalist for State Teacher of the Year, screams of delight could be heard all the way up here in Short Pump!
Be this as it may, I am still super proud of my daughter and her husband, and am grateful to get the chance to spend a few days with them. Lucy will be coming with us. Since the awards gala will be held at a fancy hotel in downtown Columbia, the educrats are actually putting them up for the night...so Pam and I will serve as dog sitters Wednesday night. Then on Thursday night, she has some other function to attend with Jon, so we will have a pizza and hang out with the dogs again. The rest of the weekend will be an educrat-free environment which will involve lots of fun stuff and good food.
Ten years from now, the above sentence will be what the written word will have devolved to thanks to Twitter and texting. Adjectives and adverbs will have been completely replaced with emojis by 2025. 😫
But seriously, this will be a short week. I will have two days of manic activity at the office so I can spend the rest of the week visiting with my daughter down in Columbia. Funny story. Last year, she won the Teacher of the Year award for her school, then followed that up with a TOY award for her district. Pam and I attended the awards banquet where that second honor was bestowed and it came as a shock to all of us. It was quite an honor to win such an award after only four years in the teacher business. A year has passed. Her duties as TOY have been quite extensive, and oddly, they have just begun. You see, in the education business, everything is counterintuitive. Educrats are a breed apart. Apparently, when you win a TOY award, your "term" lasts for three years. The first year you're essentially a TOY in training. This entails adding roughly three hours a day to your normal ten hour work day doing education-y things which have nothing to do with teaching. The second year, you actually serve as the TOY, which as far as I can tell involves making several unpaid speeches and serving on a dozen unpaid committees. Finally, year three arrives and with it the coveted title, Teacher of the Year Emeritas, another unpaid position, whereby you help train the poor sap who has been selected as that year's TOY. As you can see, this title is quite the honor, and quite the boon for the district central office since it's like they gain a new part time unpaid employee for three years! I say unpaid, when actually that isn't true. I am told that this weekend Kaitlin will finally receive her TOY stipend...a check for a thousand dollars, which by my rough calculations works out to about $3.14 an hour for the extra work she has inherited since her big "win." When she recently learned that she had fallen just short of being a finalist for State Teacher of the Year, screams of delight could be heard all the way up here in Short Pump!
Be this as it may, I am still super proud of my daughter and her husband, and am grateful to get the chance to spend a few days with them. Lucy will be coming with us. Since the awards gala will be held at a fancy hotel in downtown Columbia, the educrats are actually putting them up for the night...so Pam and I will serve as dog sitters Wednesday night. Then on Thursday night, she has some other function to attend with Jon, so we will have a pizza and hang out with the dogs again. The rest of the weekend will be an educrat-free environment which will involve lots of fun stuff and good food.
No comments:
Post a Comment