4 hour meeting

Today we had a curriculum meeting for our dept (early years: nursery thru kindergarten). It was from 1:00-5:00. You may be saying "ouch! that's a long meeting" well... yes. but i was really pumped about it!
see, the early years management team: jeanette, rebecca, stacy, and tasha (remember these names because they will come up later) have been meeting once a week for 5 months writing a curriculum and we are finally getting some input into it all. i like that stuff anyway, so i was thinking "wow-4 hours, we'll really be able to get a lot done and maybe next year we'll actually have some direction!"
well- that would be great, but it wouldn't be in keeping with the pyp (if you were an ssis teacher, that would have made you laugh).

it is a generally known fact (among the american teachers....) that nothing useful gets done at pyp meetings. i realized early on that this meeting was no exception. about 20 minutes in i started keeping a time log of what went on in the meeting. it's borderline hilarious (in a dry, "why oh why is this my life" kind of way). i will deffinitely be doing this for ALL future meetings.
here is what i spent my afternoon doing:

1:00-1:10 Jeanette (boss) rambles about how much we have to do and how we better get on with it
1:10-1:25 Each person reads 1 article and shares it with partner.
1:25-1:30 Jeanette talks to herself about whether we should discuss as a group what everyone thinks of the articles and then decides and agrees with herself that this is unneccesary.
1:30-1:45 Chit Chat
1:45-2:15 Kate writes "standards of understanding" statements for each of the major sections of the early years curriculum while rest of dept talks about various things, a small portion of which refers to curriculum. Jeanette tells kate "bravo, well done. if you could just type those up for me that'd be a big help."
2:15-2:45 Jeanette assigns each group of 3 a section of the cur. for which to identify skill standards (let me explain here what this actually entails: each section already has a list of these standards written. the assignment was to read them (about 1/3 of a page worth of writing) and identify which ones were appropriate for that section and which maybe belonged somewhere else. this could be done with a check mark.) staff works on this- 1 group does not finish.
2:45-3:20 chit chat
3:20-3:45 break
3:50-4:20 (jeanette is gone and rebecca is now leading meeting) some relatively productive cur. work is done.
4:20-4:25 jeanette returns and is caught up on what she missed
4:25-4:50 jeanette and stacy argue about the formation of the pre-k cur. and the pyp documents. *this is significant because if you'll remember, they have been meeting about this exact topic for 5 months.* 3 comments by other staff are made during this time, all of which are entirely ignored.
(4:30-4:32 student throwing rocks outside hits the window- chatter, jokes, re-enactments about this ensue)
this argument ends with the statement "we'll worry about that later, this isn't important right now."
4:50 meeting ajourns.

we did about an hours worth of work in 4 hours- and i have no doubt in my mind that many walked away from that meeting thinking we got a lot done. its sad to say, but this is a pretty accurate picture of most meetings at my school... you have to either laugh or cry- or be too stupid to notice how much time we waste! am happy to say today it made me laugh... today. :)