"Professional Development"

Or, another huge waste of time and money.

I spent ten hours in "professional development" this week. It was intended to inform us of the new Math textbook adoption. I teach English to Speakers of Other Languages. I won't say I don't teach math at all, but I certainly don't get math textbooks or need TEN HOURS of people telling me that "graphic organizers are a good idea" or giving me some math manipulatives to play with. I learned about math manipulatives in college! They really were talking to us like we'd never taught math before in our lives and the ENTIRE thing could have been easily cut to five hours (or less).

Every teacher in our large system had to do this training whether they get the textbooks or not. My wife teaches at a school that uses a completely different program and she still has to go. How much time and money do they have? If I hear about spending cuts this year, I'm going to go nuts...