I've Got Joy Joy Joy Joy Down in my Heart (despite this post)

Our staff has been dealt a blow with the announcement that the district, in their INFINITE WISDOM (insert sarcasm here), has decided to move our principal to a different school--a "failing" school--in the hopes that he'll turn it around. He is disappointed about this decision, and the staff is devastated. We are in the middle of submitting angry and pleading letters to the board members in the hopes that they will reconsider. We are all realizing the incredible contribution he has made to this school, and we all know that an administrator who has your back and who will go to bat for you at the district level is hard to come by. I don't know what the outcome of our combined letters and phone calls will be, but if the district and the board members turn a deaf ear to us, at least our principal will know that we didn't let him go without a fight.

In other news, I am officially a BTSA graduate! I have finished the requirements of California's two year induction program..... just in time to move to Michigan. How ironic! We had the last event last night, where all the people who run BTSA at our district waxed poetic about how they wish they had had a program like BTSA to help them in their first years of teaching--and all the participating teachers were secretly rolling their eyes and gagging themselves. Yes, BTSA, there's nothing like adding 40 extra hours [according to their requirement list] of paperwork per year to make a struggling first year teacher successful. Because goodness knows what would have happened if we had spent those 40 hours a year planning, teaching, copying, or making materials... At the event last night, each teacher received a rose, but mine was almost dead so I threw it away. We also got a gold BTSA pin, about an inch wide. I thought about poking somebody with it, but the person responsible for starting BTSA wasn't in the room...