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Message: [QUOTE="Hey Adrien!, post: 4383826, member: 5787"] I can kinda relate to both of these points. We have a new head of middle school, our first head of middle school to come straight from another school in about twelve years. So far, I really like her: open, fair, communicative, honest, personable without being chummy, hard-working. The issue is that a second year employee at the school applied for the same job and did not make the final cut (literally no educational leadership experience and very little American teaching experience). She's my age (36) and spent the previous decade in Southeast Asia after living in the Pacific Northwest. To make a long story short, she, although having no authority to do so, is asserting herself as almost a middle management role in our middle school, a role that not only is totally unnecessary, but also not even in existence in a middle school of eighty students and six department heads, me being one of them. Micromanaging, as you will, without having the authority to even be in that position, so that's awkward. What's especially awkward is that our new hires (we have four of them) think it's normal because they don't know any different whenever they get steamrolled. I share a room with a new hire who runs the English department: she's a competent, great co-worker so far, but I occasionally catch her reading my barometer on what I think about how this wannabee admin oversteps her bounds. She's staying corporate, but my guess is that a future happy hour will give some necessary truth serum for some good ol' fashioned smack talking. My goal with this is just tacitly tell the new hires what's important and what's unnecessary aka one of the #1 skills to survive as a teacher. Somewhat adjacent to this is that I've been kinda volun-told to help our new head of middle school get used to all the idiosyncrasies of our school, something that I really enjoy and don't mind doing, just a time suck during my prep periods, but I like being helpful. Good karma for the future, I guess. Random aside, I was hand picked by two members of the board to take over our competitive math team. They're typical hands-on board member parents (oblivious that they are hands on), and both of which went to MIT together and have legitimate genius level kids when it comes to math. Anywho, I was warned of this by our AD/Electives coordinator and he basically told me [I]name your price[/I] considering the situation and the parents involved, so after a little negotiating, I'll be leading the math team earning more than double per hour that I make coaching. Not bad for a guy who failed his last math class at UConn! [/QUOTE]

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