Today was the first meeting I’ve ever been to where everyone seemed to phone it in, including the people in charge of the meeting.

I’ve mentioned before how the Company For Which I Work (not its real name) has for the last few years, been requiring us to attend odd little training meetings during what used to be time off. The meetings are mostly useless and seem to exist to justify the employment of one or more people above us. Usually, the only useful part is the  sharing session where we pass around lessons that have worked and therefore get a selection of proven ideas.

Today, though, we were expected to describe how last year went–fine except for problems caused by you guys–and then watched a video of a poor gentleman dying in front of a class in what appeared to be a last minute change of schedule. Although the video clip was entertaining in an “I feel you pain” kind of way, it’s the kind of thing I hate doing at meetings such as these. It’s like having a professional baseball player studying a worse player’s batting style and saying “don’t do that” and calling it training.

There was some interesting politics where a couple teachers told us they would lose their positions because the company lost the contract but the company was trying to find them other placements. Why the positions were lost had us taking bets on when the school would come back to CFWIW and beg for trained teachers. (I can’t give more details than that except to say that private schools seemed to have discovered a way to get the free teachers from the JET Programme; the schools then discover that not all foreigners are trained language teachers.)

When we got the sharing part, most of us didn’t have handouts. We just got up and talked about the lesson or activity and promised to deliver it by email if anyone was interested. I tried to get copies of mine, but had technical issues meshed with a lack of incentives to deal with the issues so I just got up and talked.

When time was up, we bolted for the train station and home. We get to do this again in April (for orientation) and then in July (for no reason whatsoever).