Thursday, August 21
Fun Times
So, this week at work we've spent 8 hours a day in stupid meetings where we spend so much time playing useless games that the important things are rushed so we never get clarification on just what to enforce and how. Today I got in trouble for being late to a meeting because our sped department meeting ran over (10 minutes) and I just had to pee, so I went. You know, I never believed my mom when she blamed her over-active bladder on us kids, now I know it really wasn't a guilt trip. Anyway, the 2 hour meeting I was late to (and left early from to take Mandolin to her therapy session) consisted of all 200 people who work at my school sitting in a large circle and playing drums. I am not kidding you. 10 minutes in I started to turn green and then the jerkoff leading the session made a crazy jazz hand motion and everyone started playing as loud as they could. Next thing I know I was throwing up in front of everyone. I just know that will be in the yearbook.
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15 comments:
Oh no! You poor old thing! That is my mothers biggest nightare to b ill in front of people.
are you pregnant again mrs?
Wed will be our first faculty only day before school starts and I am dreading it. The time could be spent so much better setting up classrooms getting organized... meeting new teachers, but we are spending most of the day listening to some motivational speaker
drums really sound awful Jilly...
Jilly, team building has to be one of the biggest cons ever. Really, does anyone feel better or more congenial after the "trust fall" or the chanting or the psychoanalysis of group? Ugh. Treat adults as adults. Team building is a bandaid and infantilism at its worst. I am feeling for you.
One of my first years of teaching, my district hired Zig Ziggler to teach a one-day seminar to all the teachers in our district. We had to sit in the auditorium while they passed out little yarn pompoms ("warm fuzzies") that we were to exchange with each other--no one did--and then we learned how to banish "stinkin' thinkin'."
I hate to think what they spent to hire Zig--he was in his heyday of positive thinking seminars--while we were all disheartened by being grossly underpaid and working in outdated, crumbling facilities.
Team building, in my mind is a leftover from the seventies and eighties- antiquated and worth(-)less than they think it is. What is good is to have some sort of mechanism to allow you to meet and greet folks you will be working with, answering to, or relying on to fulfill your own job requirements before the crisis hits. And whether that is a modified parent's night but for the faculty or whatever, I don't know. Maybe they should make up dance cards.
i an mot expecting another baby (thank god). the sound along with how the air was literally moving with the energy of the drums made me sick. i wasn't the only one to come away from yesterday ill, i was just the first.
my guy's school asked them in june what they wanted for the firt week back adn they said 30 minute meetings with no game, just give them the important info and get out. lucky bastard. this am we had to dress nice for a group picture (rolls eyes) and then had to sit and watch some damn fish movie.
last year they all bought us a "Fish Book" and now everything int he school is wall paperd in the fish theme. Those fuckers took our watercoolers for budgets cuts, and I would GLADLY sell my fish book back to get a new one.
for my job in college, we had to do a bunch of teambuilding bullshit and when i refused to do one activity the speaker made me wear a dunce-type hat that said "grumpy hat" on it. I have been in grumpy hat mode all week. I've been sitting at my chair crocheting a baby blanket and not really participating, but not overly bitching either. bitching won't work, so i'm in the "leave me alone and i'll leave you alone" mode.
jilly
There are huge differences between teambuilding exercises and ice breakers. It sounds like your teambuilding exercises basically stink.
Ice breakers take about 10 minutes, and if done well, can range from slightly-less-than-agony-wrenching to quite enjoyable.
I fail to see how making someone wear a 'grumpy hat' is going to motivate them or anyone else.
And I'm with you on the meeting thing...shorter is better.
My boss recently took all of us to a baseball game as a sort of morale lifter. We're already a great team, so I don't think it could be technically called teambuilding. But that is my kind of activity! We all had a blast!
Jenny Robin, I agree that an activity for morale is fine and if it's fun, probably does its job. But anything that involves role-playing, confessions, acting of any kind, really, is such a waste of time and condescending. An icebreaker where you're doing something for a very limited amount of time would be okay. But not everyone on a team likes participatory games. I know I don't. I hate them. I just want to sit down, listen, learn, give feedback, and get to work.
if they were smart they would have soup club. :)
if they were really smart they'd have alcohol
OMG Jilly is that the damn fish movie where they throw the fish to each other? We had to watch that thing too
Made me want to toss a carp someplace alright
"Jilly, team building has to be one of the biggest cons ever."
i agree. I go to a lot of meetings and suffer through some horrendous shit like this. It's demoralizing and makes people feel like they're in 7th grade
you knwo in team building things where someone always says " there's no I in team" dont you always want to say " there's no U either so fuck off "
i don't like "ice breakers" or teambuilding crap, i have never seen any of it done to any good purpose EVER. just tell me what i need to know and let me leave. i work with MR kids, i myself am not MR and don't needed to be treated as such. they wanted us to all go bowling together last year and made a big deal out of it. i don't bowl, so i didn't go. I stayed at the school and completed some paperwork with the much needed break and you know, 3 days later when grades were due, i was in a happy place whereas others were not. My feelings are that they build professional days into the school year so that we can get grades and conferences in, not so I can sit and watch some jackass mime (last year was about miming, not fish, and boy did some jackass mime). yes orb, it was that damn seattle thing with the fish tossing. alex, if they let us drink, i could see it getting better, but the government doesn't pay for alcohol.
jilly
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