There are thousands of teachers going back to school this week, and you would be wise to give them a wide berth. They are liable to have already been pushed close to the limits of their endurance, sick and tired of silly questions and outrageously useless answers and fed up with childish games in general.  

And the kids have yet to arrive.  

This is Teacher Work Week, one of the most poorly executed good ideas in the long and often addle-witted history of educational bureaucracy. There is no doubt that the time is desperately needed. There is a lot of work to be done by returning teachers preparing for a new year, but if they plan on getting it done, they’d better plan on staying after school.  

The week belongs primarily to those who tell people how to do the job, not those who do it. This includes principals, assistant principals, administrators, superintendents and their various assistant superintendents, counselors, the occasional inspirational speaker, and sometimes a brown-noser who went to a seminar over the summer and says, “I just want to share something with the other teachers.” 

While I cannot say that this “pre-planning” did not have some value, I can say that whatever we were accomplishing when I did it was not apparent. Maybe listening to a principal who thinks she’s Knute Rockne giving a locker room speech was more important than making sure I had a desk and a math book for each student, but I couldn’t see how. Perhaps standing in a circle, clapping and shouting in unison “we are (pause) one pack!” puts somebody in the mood to explain prepositions to 9-year-olds. It did not for me, but who knows? 

I went through a dozen or so of these weeks and this is what I observed: Nothing has ever been accomplished during teacher training except maybe the trainees getting better at Sudoku; there has never been a staff meeting that couldn’t be made more productive by canceling it; there has never been a principal who couldn’t be improved by taking the microphone away from her; and the ninth time you take Bloodborne Pathogen Training, you will not learn much that wasn’t covered the second, fifth and eighth time.  

Based on my teaching experience, a round of golf would be better preparationthan a round of seminars.  

The game has a lot to teach teachers. Everybody starts off with unrealistically high expectations, hopes and dreams that will be regularly dashed, often through no fault of the player. Your best shots are liable to hit trees, roll into sand traps or find water that shouldn’t have been there.  

There are no gimmes. Easy-looking putts lip out and sometimes you are just going to come up short. You will frequently wonder why you are doing this. 

All your fellow players will tell you what you are doing wrong and give advice on how to do it better, even though they aren’t doing it any better than you are. There’salways a new driver on the market, a chipper that “can’t miss,” more accuraterangefinders and ten thousand instructional videos that promise to add distance, eliminate slices, and fix everything that’s wrong.  

You might try it all, buy it all and believe it all—but your scores won’t change. 

If you can’t see the parallels here, you either don’t play golf or have never been a teacher. My “expert” advice is the same for either: Tee it high and let it fly.  

As for all you others, pretend you just heard somebody yell “FORE” and get out of the way.