IBM vs Education .. a melodrama
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If you send your people to an IBM Leadership Seminar, the instructor will guide and prod, say, 25 people through a highly distilled and interactive experience. All applaud, eat expensive boxed lunches, and may heed a point or two.
Bill Blarney is a famous well-paid instructor whose renowned programs are available in boxed sets on DVD.
As the IBM events planner, you go up to Bill Blarney at the end of the day as the late light filters through the graceful weeping amber trees beyond the huge picture windows into the plush seminar room. “Fine job today, Mr. Blarney,” you say. “I want to talk about the terms of your next engagement with IBM.”
Deeply at ease with his fine status, fine suit, and porsche reputation, fat-cattish, post-canary, post-saucer-brimming-with-thickest-cream, Bill Blarney beams all but beatifically at you.
“Well, Bill, next week starting Monday at <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />8am, we want you to teach five different seminars before 3pm.”
“What!?” Bill expostulates, snorting like a startled stallion, “That’s absurd!”
“Additionally,” you add, “each 58 minute seminar will have between 30-40 students, a different group each hour. Between most of the seminars, you will have no break whatsoever – one group will file in as the other files out.”
“What?!” Bill’s eyes begin to bulge. A vein on his sweat-slicked forehead visibly pulses. “That’s absurd!”
“Moreover,” you continue, “each seminar plan involves completely different material.”
“Well, I, well, er, I – I guess I could do that on Monday if absolutely necessary to keep the lucrative, I mean important IBM account, but well, but it’s overwhelming, it’s unprecedented,” says Bill.
“And,” you say, “you must do the same pattern with all new materials and enthusiasms on Tuesday and then Wednesday and Thursday and Friday.”
“What!? You mean I can’t just repeat Monday’s materials? This is preposterous. I’m a leading professional. This is not humanly possible.”
“Well, you must also give assignments each day which you must correct and comment upon each evening – from at least 150 daily participants.”
“Nonsense,” barked Bill. “You’ve lost your mind.”
“Yes, and you will be paid 1/5 of your current salary and have no car allowance.”
Bill could no longer speak.
“And after next week’s five days, you will do five days a week thusly every month for nine & ½ months of the year.”
Weakly, licking the froth off his lips, Bill said, “No business could possibly demand this level of performance from any imaginable instructor. The energy, the organization, it’s simply inconceivable. You couldn’t pay me enough even if I could handle it for one single marathon week, least of all 36 weeks in a row. What has American business come to?”
“Not American business, BillBoy,” you say, “you’ve been made an American high school teacher.”
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pls send this to your dear teacher friends as a holiday confection from both of us .. if only there were a way to thank them enough.
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the education-obsessed world begins today with you
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much agreed. The American high school schedule bears no relationship to the way anyone thinks or actually works whether one is a student or a teacher.
It's amazing how just taken for granted it is 'at large' in the society that 'business' is so much more efficient that any other arrangement. Thank you for a nice karate chop to the pretensions of the corporate world. And a revelation of how staggering the job of a K-12 teacher is.
We must fight for Great Education as if our nation depended on it. Because it does.
We must make the meme: Education rules.
Please start distilling your own key education priorities and thoughts into fortune cookie form so I can add them to the Education Instructional Complex Plan.
HOW would a day be better designed, cl, for both students and teachers?
These things we can teach each child.
You were born knowing what you need to know. – Plato
Humans were designed for success in Universe. – Fuller
Every Man, Woman, and child is a Star. – The Beast
Thanks, daleth, for the education tidbits.
Think if each child had the delightful, the ebullient confidence that your distillations present as presents!
Thanks. I'm coming up with a set of axioms
for a philisophical system. Mostly cribbed from everyone else. But “It's okay to steal from other doctrines” is my first axiom.
Here's another one for the list I started earlier.
Being born human is a virtue.
I both laughed and cried when I realized that someone actually had to come out and say that.
“Being born human is a virtue.”
Staying human is the challenge.
The BuChenConRovFeld Entity has failed.
The BuChenConRovFeld Entity has failed.
Bad monkey! No Banana!
Sadly, this bad-monkey-black-hole sucks in banana plantations — all of the banana plantations that ever were or will be. The scale of their depredations is beyond what we have yet imagined.
We (cheer, sense, fun) do win, but it requires significant expansion of the Imagi Nation.