At least I got mileage...

Do you ever have days where you don't feel like you accomplished anything at work? Today was one of those days.

We were asked to meet at the division office (LRTs, principals, ed psychs, administrators, etc) to talk about the new Alternative Ed policy. I'll try to explain what alt ed is. Most students are in the regular program (10, 20 and 30 classes) (the government has provincial curriculum guides for these programs). Some students, however, can't manage in the regular program, so they are placed in modified programs (11, 21 and 31 classes). In modified programs, the students aren't required to meet every objective set out in the regular program curriculums. I think they have to meet 50% of the regular objectives. Some students aren't successful in modified programs either, so they are placed in alternate programs (18, 28 and 38 classes). Alternate programs focus on basic life skills such as grocery shopping and doing laundry. You can actually go past this program and place students on functionally integrated programs, which is quite intensive. The one designated student in my school follows a functionally integrated program.

Anyhoo, Sask Learning came out with new policies and procedures for the alt ed program. So this morning we met and someone came out from Sask Learning to explain the program, help us "create dialogue" (puke, I hate that phrase) about what a student in an alternate program looks like, and to answer any questions we have. That part was fine; it was actually quite informative and it's laid out quite nicely in the fancy, paper-wasting documents they provided us. (Honestly, do they really need to use font size 80 with 2-inch margins? I'm exaggerating, but only slightly.)

The "fun" part was in the afternoon, when the LRTs were asked to begin developing the programs for Alt Ed. I think it's great that they're empowering us to develop these as a group since we will be the ones implementing and carrying out the programs, but we would have appreciated a better timeline to do this in. We started working on the programs today (there are 11 in total) and they all have to be done by May 1st and sent in to Sask Learning for approval at that time. Normally, curriculum developers are given time off to work but we are expected to do this on top of everything else. They're giving us release time from the classroom to work on this and meet in our little groups, but then that's less time we're actually in the classroom. Argh!

The majority of the group wanted to develop the ELA 18 program as a large group. I knew it was a disaster right from the beginning. There were a few people with strong opinions there, and they argued about every little decision. They had completely different philosophies and they weren't willing to budge from their point of view. Some amount of disagreement can be good, but this was downright unproductive. In the end, we decided to break up into smaller groups and work on it that way. At least I got mileage....

Surprise, surprise, I have a cold... that made sitting through this meeting and my Kinettes meeting this evening reeeeeeally fun. I think I need my tea and bedtime snack, then a good sleep. Wow, I'm lame.