Sizing up the First LDP 2011

First LDP... it's near CNY and we're back at school, not to replace a holiday but to supposedly enhance our professionalism. The timing sucks, of course. Plus it's a Saturday...

So what's today's LDP on? More here and here about LDP. Team building.... My initial response when I saw the title was a ROFL kind of laugh. How not to... the way things are done these days is more like 'my way, and only my way'... the bosses' of course. Little Napolean wannabes they are. We have all these glossy terms and nice sounding words... permuafakatan, musyawarah, empowerment... They work fine as long as you don't go against the 'my way, and only my way' top-down management style. Big monkey 'defecate' (cannot use the sh** word, he! he!) on small monkey style. LOL! So, the mind basically switched off before the guy even started speaking cos no matter what, things must be done only one way at work anyway.... meaning teamwork is for us the lower branches monkeys only.... so that the big monkey up there can climb higher.... eat better. We'll just get more of the you-know-what coming our way.... and if you look face up, it's just going to splatter straight onto your face.

Anyway, there wasn't much new for me... I've done so many of these personality tests thingy on my own. But one thing the speaker said though... tak payah jaga hati orang, tapi jangan sakiti hati orang also... LOL! I think many bosses, especially lady ones fail on the latter cos they are just too 'mother-like' in running a school.... very stifling!!! Matriarchal, autocratic, inflexible.... and like children we must listen to them only.... The first part.... works fine for me too cos that also means us teachers also don't have to jaga their hati. 8)

5 hours on a Saturday morning... work on weekend, some more so near CNY. Wonder whether we can claim double the hours back. We go back for sports practice after office hours... and then these calculative bosses keep reminding us they have a right to keep us till 3.30 p.m. (no lunch break hours for us) at school to fulfill the working hours requirement. Wrong calculations??? As it is sometimes our classes end at almost 3 p.m.

So LDP... they're just a waste of our time. Speakers earn extra pocket money though.... so go figure who benefits most. Anyway, speakers usually don't offer much new things cos they take from the same boring pool of people... you know, the friend-friend kind of connection.

Then LDP was followed by a short briefing on Headcount... counting as though we're in the corporate world. Students become just statistics... to be shuffled around with all the TOV (Take Off Value)s and ETR (Expected Test Results). Aiyo! We're dealing with people lah... Even studies have shown that all these Headcounts don't contribute much to building characters....

And by the time we're done with all these idiotic paper work, we're also numbed by the effort that we're too drained to focus on teaching... I think the greatest stumbling block these days to good teaching effort is the administrators... Cakap banyak, karenah banyak, minta banyak... prihatin-ness is the thing that is kurang banyak.

Anyway... this is my most unproductive Saturday morning for 2011 so far!