Agendas: friend or foe?

In the days leading up to the Westerners' first day of teaching, the English department had a few "meetings." Given the outcome (and I use the term "outcome" very loosely), I am now a die-hard supporter of agendas. Of course, creating agendas for meetings has been drilled into my work life for the better part of a decade. Agendas provide a map, and perhaps, can even serve as an accountability measure (for example, if you don't cover what you said you were going to cover in a meeting, then what the hell was the meeting about and why did you have it?!). Above all, though, agendas provide organization and with some insight, a rough timeline for the meeting in which you're about to endure.

So, why, you may wonder, the sudden interest in agendas? Well, if you're of the school of thought that agendas place everyone on the same page for a particular meeting and that they tend to serve as a loose communciation or information vehicle, then just imagine what NOT having an agenda might be like in a meeting where two languages are spoken (and you don't speak the second language).

Ok -- by now, I'm assuming you've picked up that I was in meeting where an agenda was not present. Fair enough. I've held my share of meetings with forgotten agendas (but always with personal notes to make sure I stayed on point!). Alas, in this particular meeting, I don't think anyone knew the purpose. And so we spent an ungodly amount of time talking about which order the English teachers should complete weekly plans and daily lesson plans (keep in mind we were scheduled to teach the following day and had already completed this week's "weekly plan"). The debate was on whether to (1) Plan for the next day's teaching lessons, or (2) Plan for the following week's lessons. Between you and me, I personally felt that MAYBE planning for the first day of classes was *slightly* more important than worrying about what we would teach the following week. But hey, I'm just an English teacher. What do I know???

Oh, blast those weekly and daily plans!

I'm not entirely sure what happened, but the meeting quickly turned into the vice principal dominating the conversation. She doesn't speak English, so for 20 minutes, the Koreans talked amongst themselves while the department manager gazed in the distance with a look of sheer "I'm getting my ass kicked" bushwacked look. Although I didn't know what the VP was saying, I had only assumed the topic had been changed. What I did think was that everything sounded more important in Korean. But it probably isn't. Turns out, I was right. After 20 minutes, English was spoken again and we were STILL talking about weekly vs. daily plans. AYA!


*End rant on agendas and weekly/daily plans*