So it has been a good week at the workshop, and so far a great summer in terms of purpose, verve, productivity, and general satisfaction. I must say, though, snobby as this is, that it is very difficult to actually work with other teachers, teachers who so easily get wrapped up in either their worship of technology or abiding hatred of it, to which they attribute their reactionary bemoanings of the degeneration of the values of youth, which is all very immigranty, ultimately, I think. It's not just that, though, teachers are complainers, and teachers are not very good learners. It makes me sick to hear teachers complain about what they don't know. I mean, it's good to be honest and not to try and bullshit your way through something, but let's face it folks--if you're a teacher and you don't understand or know something, you'd best run off and learn about it. See a problem, fix it. Simple, no?

But of course. And so there are all sorts of pointless arguments about math which everyone should know by now. But people mostly complain. And I've gotten really annoyed with a science teacher at my school, one I haven't worked with before. I mean, when you miss almost two days of a five-day workshop for personal reasons not of an emergency nature, it's really not your place to complain about how you weren't "given time" to prepare a lesson. And then it's not acceptable to fake your way through your own very public and unarticulated doubts about the whole field and to stumble your way through a low content, abstract, self-important, and intentionally protracted presentation, powerpoint-laden or not. It's just insulting and unhelpful and it's nice to frame questions about power and want to "figure things out" to "wrap your mind around things" but you know what? You're supposed to be a teacher, and you're supposed to be writing lesson plans everyday, so why does it take you more than a week to get anything done? It's a professional embarassment, really.