Thank the Lord..

...this week is finally over.

Despite having so much to do (or maybe because there is so much to do), these few weeks are taking forever. There's been all kinds of draaaaamaaaaa at the fakeytown fartless office, because they have hired a Really Big Ho' (TM) to run the place in the midst of the sucking vortex created by the absence of its previous manager, your old friend and mine, Puritannica. The chaos resultant from Puritannica's departure has not, as a rational person would surmise, educated the moneybags owners as to her efficiency at making them shit-tons of money. On the contrary, they are rapidly trying to distract everyone from the aforementioned chaos by badmouthing Puritannica as much as possible. How rogue she was! How disappointed and embarrassed they were to discover it!

As another of my colleagues likes to say (to anything), whatever.

I also planned this training opportunity for my coworkers at my school about teaching certification information, professional/national board certification, and the No Child Left Behind Highly-Qualified Teacher (TM) requirements. (Yes, each one of those has its own separate "handbook.") Note that since we are a private school, you do not have to meet state or federal teacher requirements. Instead, you only need to meet whatever standards are set out by your school. As I may have already told you, our school does not actually have any standards. However, there are several people there that do have teaching certificates that they will at some point need to get renewed, and I thought it might be a useful exercise for us to examine our staff base and perhaps see things like what percentage of our staff actually is certified? What percentage would meet highly-qualified teacher requirements? That kind of data might be nice to have in order to either a) demonstrate the quality of your staff or 2) make obvious how you need to improve the quality of your staff. I also thought that since I had to go through all this work to understand this crap for my own procert program I would save other people the work and summarize it for them in a brief, clear, bullshit-free way. I am very good at taking things that are long, complicated, and full of bullshit and elucidating them. It's true. Just ask my uncle Herb.*

Anyway, no one in the company would go. This proves several things that we already knew:
1). Most of the staff at fartless school does not give a fart (!) about professional development.
2). None of the staff at fartless school is paid enough to justify going "above and beyond" the bare minimum teaching requirements.
3). Those select staff members at fartless school that do have/need to renew their teaching certificates are too lazy to do anything about it.

I'm really kind of disappointed (but not exactly surprised). So much for my "contributing as a colleague to the development of my school as a whole" procert goal. I'll have to find another way to meet that goal now. Jerks.

Maybe I'll make something up tomorrow when I am out being productive all day with LaRue. We have some serious productivity planned. And that's not even a dirty joke, it's true.

Just ask my uncle Herb...


* It's from Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. You should read it.

Update

You may have noticed a bit of a culling has occurred around here. I haven't been posting much because things have been nuts at work and getting ready for the big move, and plus I just haven't really been in the mood to blog about my cooking adventures lately. To be quite honest, I haven't been having many such adventures lately. We've been trying to eat up all those meals so we have fewer things to move. (I also went through my books and tried to find some I could get rid of or sell back. Out of 13 bookshelves, I found 3 books I could part with. Ha. Oops.)

Anyway, I'm going to broaden my blogging scope a bit to include more than "pizza." The title of my blog, since it is clearly very catchy, will stay the same--you can just think of "pizza" as a broader metaphorical term, symbolizing all the relevant goings on in the world of nitza. And really, if you're looking for a juicy metaphor to represent Things of Importance, nothing beats pizza.

Except maybe "nachos," and that doesn't rhyme. Oh, and don't worry, I left the posts w/recipes ;)