Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Top Ten Ways to Lose Good Teachers, A Guide for Principals

10. Have faculty meeting sheerly for the sake of making your inferior underlings come to a meeting.
9. Craft extraordinarily cheesey reason for said meeting. Be sure to begin with oral readings of various anecdotes related or unrelated to your meeting agenda.
8. Forget that teachers are planning for Open House this week and writing report cards. Don't thank them for hard work. Really, don't acknowledge them at all.
7. Give teachers an assignment. Only give them this afternoon to do it and require proof of completion to be turned in by tomorrow morning. Make sure the assignment insults their professional judgment.
6. Force teachers to call five of their students to share with their parents something positive about them. Make sure to only give them this afternoon so that the teachers will feel completely ungenuine in their compliments as they complete their assignment.
5. Chuckle to yourself as you watch each teacher get sucked into five 30 minute conversations when they need to get home. Cackle with relief that you yourself have never been a classroom teacher. What chumps!
4. Make teachers write up results of each conversation to turn into you. Don't forget to also ask for the list of nice things they said about all 22 students.
3. Remind teachers how important good relationships are and what a relationship-centric school we are! Disregard the fact that you have no positive relationships with any teachers and never tell them anything positive that they do.
2. While teachers are on the phone, be sure to ignore any emails from teachers that you don't want to answer. I know the answers might be important to the teachers, but you don't want to clue them in that you don't know the answer to their question. Just hit delete.
1. Go home early. It sure is easier to get out of the parking lot when all the teachers are on the phone! Compliment self on a job well done. Those teachers will be so grateful for your insightful cleverness. They never would have thought to call a parent for a positive reason! It's good you're principal. You probably won't have any openings to fill next year.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Do you teach at my school? This is an awesome list!

Unfortunately many schools have "leaders" like this. . . . . :o(

I also don't understand why non-academic teachers or staff members get preference to be administrators.