There are probably only a handful, if that, of teachers out there – but there are some – who for some reason do not want us to be doing this work, and we don’t want them in our private conversation here.
So if you haven’t sent in a bio, please do so. We must know each other, at least a bit, if we are to maintain the level of trust that alone guarantees real communication happening in our group. I am of the opinion that a short bio goes a long way in ‘splaining who we are to each other.
There is no need to comment and such, but there is the need to send in a bio. The history in this web space, were it fully known, easily supports my request. I want to keep the group small, with lots of transparency, more arguing, and high levels of honesty. We need to pursue Diane’s recent suggestion of phone contact with people who sign up.
My real fear – however improbable – is that even one mole in a big department who had a lone wolf, one of us, in there, and who wanted to print out anything written by the lone wolf could make things really ugly for the lone wolf. How do I know that? It happened to me, literally.
A colleague/mole who didn’t want to agree with anything I said in meetings (with two years in a classroom and not very good French – she really argued about early speech output), printed out a few articles from here when I was at East High school and bam there I was with her in three meetings, one with an AP, one with another AP, and a third with a clueless principal. I’m won’t bore you with the details, but neither of us in still in that building.
And then another situation occurred where one of our current group members asked me in a private email if there was a certain teacher who was against him in his school was in our group and sure enough there she was, and so I was able to delete her immediately. I have received other emails with similar requests. Can you imagine?
So send your bios, please, to me at benslavic@yahoo.com and I will share them with the group. Be aware that about once a year I go on a rampage and delete people if they haven’t sent in a bio. Sabrina is helping me with this and we are serious.
We all want this group small and we want us to know each other and trust that what we say here is safe. The nature of the change that we are in right now – an outrageous one to many people really – requires that we enjoy the ability to state freely what we are thinking, as we daily wrestle with the language teaching beast, to colleagues whom we can trust.