Staff Meetings
Show up promptly for all after-school staff meetings. Take notes, stay awake, and pay attention to everything. You might think staff meetings are boring, but it's one of your extracurricular duties, so attend. Don't go AWOL because most principals circulate a sign-in sheet during meetings or instruct a secretary to scan the room and write the names of missing teachers.
School staff meetings fall into a category of meetings called recurring meetings, where you and the rest of the staff meet at regular calendar intervals, generally once a month. Staff meetings are always announced well ahead of time, and your principal expects you to attend consistently so that important information can be disseminated to you.
If you routinely sleep in staff meetings or skip them altogether you'll occasionally miss important news and debates. For example, suppose that during a meeting several teachers propose that when the kids finish state-mandated testing, their scratch paper should be graded based on how well the kids have copied the problems and solved them. Other teachers ask whether state law permits such a thing. A debate begins — and because you're awake, you're lucky enough to be part of it.
After a lively exchange, the consensus seems to be that the test-administration manual forbids students from copying problems and forbids scratch paper from being graded by the state. Therefore, the staff decides that teachers shouldn't grade scratch paper, either. The thought occurs to you, “That was no waste of time — that was an exciting, problem-solving staff meeting.”
