I got a call from the principal the other day. She called to remind me that my grades were due the next day. I got the impression it was not targeted, she was calling everyone and I welcomed the reminder. The only problem was my mouth. Instead of just saying, “Thank You” I stated that while I already knew the deadline and was halfway done, I had not seen any reminder like we usually got.
Bad timing. She went into a zealous defense of the leadership of the district and the school and how many ways they had told us. I guess she was right but it didn’t make any difference. The way they told us almost guaranteed we would not notice. Modern technology has made it possible for administrators to cover their tails with very little effort.
I am referring to group e-mails. A modern administrator can cut and paste something written earlier or by someone else, click on as many groups as they want, and send the message out immediately. It takes no time on their part but the ripple of waste keeps spreading. Sometimes they don’t bother to read what they are copying and so pass on wrong dates and times. It takes our district maybe five minutes to put together a message. Then they send it out to 1,000 teachers and unknown numbers of parents and local citizens. Let’s say the total is only 2,000. What it took the administrator five minutes to write takes at least that long to read. So 5 x 2,000 comes out to 10,000 minutes of other people’s time consumed on a message that noone cares about.
They hide information half way through or in the middle of a paragraph. They also like to link to a longer document that was prepared by someone else and the dance goes on. Buried somewhere in all that verbosity is a mention of grades being due by a certain time.
I long ago learned to forgo the pleasure of reading this fluff. Last time I looked I had over 90 e-mails from the district that I have simply archived without reading, and that is just in the last nine weeks. I really don’t need a weekly reminder of how awesome I am, how much I am appreciated and how well we are doing. That doesn’t count the ones I actually opened and the ones forwarded by my principal.
Their tails are covered. They can say that they told me. They would be right. In reality it is like trying to read the IRS code or the Educational Code of California.
We are “saving trees” and wasting lives.
homo unius libri
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Comments are welcome. Feel free to agree or disagree but keep it clean, courteous and short. I heard some shorthand on a podcast: TLDR, Too long, didn't read.