I am a teacher. Always have been, always will be.  They are my people and I “get” them.

So when I transitioned to a technology integration job I had the inside track on teachers, right?  I knew the animal well.  I had experienced the superlative moment of delivering the perfect lesson, I understood the day you sat at your desk all period out of exhaustion, I understood that there were really very few things a teacher could control – but they sure could control the heck out of them!  Here’s what I didn’t know about, everyone else who contributes to a working school district.  I still marvel at how differently they operate – within an educational institution.

Teachers on average are okay with the disequilibrium that learning brings.  And it appears teachers and students are the only real experts at leaning in school districts.  Not that everyone is an expert, but that they are not good learners or good with appearing to be learning.

Moving to digital delivery of lessons the process was tedious and tough, but teachers were typically transparent and willing to learn from mistakes, their own or others and move forward to a better product.  Students pitched in with constructive feedback to teachers, students often helped teachers make the philosophical connections to presenting content in various ways.

Teachers are the real model of how to go through a painful process of change in a positive manner.

Yet, somehow, our support teams did not make corollary shift of support.  And because they did not move it made them seem to be moving backward, or away from the direction we’re asking our teachers and students to move.  Student data systems remain rigid and inflexible, even in the face of logical requests which might alleviate a teacher’s workload.  Faced with a new ticketing system which offered transparency to the end user level, the technical group criticized the Help Desk procedure seemingly worried about the appearance of their work.  And leadership seemed unable or unwilling to provide a nudge to help alleviate the disconnect.

Here is what I don’t understand: non-teachers.

Instead of working as a team on challenges non-teachers sometimes hide their problems, like we can’t detect the evidence of those issues all over the classrooms.  Non-teachers are not okay with not knowing, having made a mistake, learning in front of others, being wrong.  And I have a problem with that.

I guess my problem is resenting that such people make their way into an educational position.  It is like we are a business entity having an educational experience versus an educational organization experiencing a business model.