School Pet Peeves?

About the camera thing: Often, it’s a school policy, not something that teachers come up with. I work in a private school, and the principal decided that a general rule for every class is that students must have their cameras turned on. Not everyone does it, of course, but I totally get the privacy issue. Therefore, I have no problem with them using a virtual background or the blur background feature. Schools that don’t allow that seriously suck.

Here are some school pet peeves I have, as a teacher:

  • Online staff courses or meetings at 2pm. This doesn’t happen often, but 2pm is THE ABSOLUTE WORST TIME to have a stupid two hour course about something that has nothing to do with my subject. I’d rather have the meeting on a Saturday than at 2pm, because that’s the time I’m finally done giving classes and am hungry to the max! I even got sick with an intestinal infection back in February because of one of these two hour courses and having to eat something that wasn’t fresh.

  • Staff meetings that won’t end because someone asks a question that only applies to them AT THE LAST MINUTE. This drives me insane! Or when people keep discussing their POV on some topic that could have been easily resolved. Once, a professional development course ended an hour later than it should have because some teachers couldn’t come to an agreement about how to grade late work.

  • Turning in empty assignments on Classroom. Seriously, you think I’m going to grade an invisible assignment just because you pressed send? No… just, no. That does not count.

  • When nobody participates. This has been happening since January in one of my groups. They’re like zombies. I say ‘hi, how are you?’ and no one answers. I try to get people to share their viewpoint on something, and … dead silence. It’s getting boring.

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