Stage Fright

Lou Grant: Where do you get off changing Murray's copy?
Ted Baxter: It was flat, Lou! I didn't change the facts, I just jazzed up the language.
Lou Grant: Jazzed up? Jazzed up? Ted, you do not change the wording of a direct quote. And I do not believe that the Queen of England calls the French Ambassador "The Dude from Frog Town."

--The Mary Tyler Moore Show, "Two Wrongs Don't Make A Writer" (2/23/74)

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Working out of the area office has some good points and some bad points. From the "good" standpoint, there's the fact that there's not a lot of predictability and get to travel all over the city to help out other Special Ed teams. On the other hand, I can never count on any two days being at all alike and I have to drive all over the damn place to tell people things that five extra seconds of thinking might have revealed.

OK, that's off my chest, now. One of the things that I actually enjoy doing is staff development. It's something that I'm definitely good at, and the satisfaction surveys back me up on this. And, as someone who's technically area staff (as opposed to school-based, even though I do carry a caseload of my own), I'm getting called on to do more staff development involving principals. This, too, can be a double-edged sword.

First, I'm definitely not principal-level, so it can be a little weird telling them what they need to do. It's also clear that some of them resent it, but there's not much I can do about it. The other thing, however, is that I have to do this stuff pretty much in tandem with my boss. What's wrong with that is that he's a little on the obsessive-compulsive side. And by "a little" I mean that we'll spend all day tomorrow tinkering with the presentation part of this thing we're doing in the afternoon. I've already gotten emails over the weekend about this, asking for changes that I'm resistant to make.

The other thing that goes wrong with presenting with him is that I'm often told that I'm going to spend a lot of time doing a given section, and then, because he can be kind of long-winded, I wind up not doing anything at all, which means that the preparation I did in order to speak goes for naught. It's pretty annoying when I'm technically off the clock and on my own time while I'm doing this.

There's an old joke about two people in a restaurant. One complains that the food is awful. The other one says "Yes, and the portions are so small!" Sometimes I feel like I'm in that realm. I go up before a tough crowd, but not nearly enough.