Just now I’m seeing lots of reels on Facebook complaining about idiotic teacher’s in-service activities. Forms groups with people you don’t usually talk to. Markers and butcher paper. Guest speakers who haven’t taught in decades because presenting pays better and they don’t have to interact with kids. Entire sarcastic reels about wasting time. I hear them. Forming groups? Warm-up actives? Don’t I have work to do? But I learned to get it done at home on my own time. In the working time I was allowed, I made photocopies, labeled folders, and moved tables and chairs in place.

Tomorrow is the day I usually post. I probably will have something going out tomorrow. But for now…

I have grievances. Old grievances. Being told I was stupid to do all the assignments I assigned my students, and then being in-serviced a few years later about how I should be doing all the quizzes, tests, and other work I assigned my students. By the same person.

But the reels I’ve been seeing about in-services don’t question the need for continuing education. They question what and by whom. One reel focused on the poor quality of presentations teachers are required to sit through especially about something they’ve already been in-serviced on a half times, each time using a new acronym. Were they ever useful? I noted that I’d received useful information about autism (from the social-worker mother of an autistic student) and poverty (from someone who grew up in generational poverty and now had a PhD), but also a horrible in-service about poverty (from someone who wanted to sell books and advocated teaching poor kids to be more selfish).

Although I have done more than a dozen presentations for organizations such as the National Council of Teachers of English and Social Studies and numerous school districts about incorporating writing and teaching writing, no one ever asked me to present at my school. A Social Studies teacher complained that I should be teaching APA form instead of MLA because “all college writing is in APA. I started with MLA in the Junior year because I was an English teacher and because all undergrad programs in our state at that time were supposed to use MLA. [As a Math major at the University of Washington and later in Computer Science, my older son assured me he’d always been required to use MLA until grad school.] I warned students to read college syllabi and always ask about using MLA if a paper was due in week six.

When I was teaching WR121, I assumed my students knew MLA taught APA. I had overviews for both and for Chicago style (used by the UofO) and urged students to use whatever style was comfortable. I offered to send those teacher materials to the Social Studies teacher so they could teach APA to their students, but they never bothered because they only wanted me to do that work. They had no intention of scoring any writing multiple choice. Only one teacher in that department looked at paragraphs.

[It’s only fair to emphasize that all of my essay-writing skills in high school came from my Social Studies classes, from handwritten 5-page position papers to typed research papers of over a dozen pages. Only outside the English departmentt in the school where I taught assigned essays. Many teachers would not have been able to do that because they didn’t possess the necessary writing skills.]

An imported Administrator told us about her skiing vacations. A former Spanish teacher wasted more than an hour teaching us a sentence about a Spanish painting. We brought in a speaker to talk to students who emphasizes that sex in high school forever ruins their lives because God said so—caught that one in time to stifle the message somewhat. A student who had advocated for that speaker later chewed me out for judging prostitution since they had a friend who was a sex workers and they only told their kids what was “age-appropriate.”

At a conference a famous writer told English teachers to identify the “bankable students” and let the rest go. “I know you want to teach them all, but you can’t.” I followed them out the door, got in past their handlers and told them they didn’t know who was bankable, that even with 20 years experience neither did I, and we had no right to assume we could make that determination.

I am judgmental. I know this about myself. I struggle to let things go.

Every year, I was required by the State of Oregon to complete 13 training videos, a number that eventually grew to 17 or 20 (!). I was supposed to watch these online informational videos and to pass the mostly true-false tests at the end with a minimum 70% score. (I could retake that test multiple times if I failed. I did fail the legal ramifications of handling toxic substances.)

One of the questions about online harassment wanted the wrong answer. I stubbornly answered it correctly year after year, and I messaged the state several times that their source was seven years, then ten years, and then twelve years out of date. Eventually they recognized that YES online harassment was a serious problem. They added it as another test.

Well, of course they did.

All this to say that education for educators is important. We need to keep improving, to stay abreast of current research and strategies. I loved the in-service on the brain, but my peers didn’t find it useful—maybe they needed that last step spelled out about applying information to their interactions with students? Two parents prepared a powerful presentation about at-risk LGBTQS+ students. The danger the presenters emphasized was the suicide rates and failure in school among these students, that this alone suggested some compassion on teachers’ part. Without making a judgement, they urged us to consider the potential impact on academic success of these teenagers. An administrator with a religious bias advocated for compassion, but their presentation was met with vocal resentment and hostility. One teacher complained they didn’t have time to insist students not use bigoted language in their class. Another complained that students had told them I refused to allow such language in my classes.

The presenters came for free to our school. One had known for a long time of their child’s sexual orientation, and the other had learned only when their college-age child came out to them. They were very clear that they were not asking anyone to change their private moral opinions, only to consider the risk to the lives and education of non-cis students when they allowed hostility to hurt them. This was my own policy: you will not swear or use pejoratives when referring to other people. We were in the 1990s a largely white school with some very wealthy families and many more who worked for those families. Horrible things were said to kids in classrooms and during sport practice. [A person gripe was the football coach calling his players “girls” as a means of demeaning them.]

I’m not asking you to change your core beliefs; I’m insisting you be polite in my class.

I was mentor for a senior project that took the temperature of the student body about LGBTQ+ and the results were so cruel that admin sequestered and vanished the results—everyone claimed never to have seen the tallies. This was some time ago and there’s been plenty of research backing up the presentation those mothers shared [also here, here, here, here, and here]. I would like to believe attitudes have changed somewhat since that in-service. I’d like to think teachers are no longer annoyed to be in-serviced about keeping their students safe.

I’d like to believe that.