Brain Stem Exhaustion--A Little Thing Called Teacher Inservice

Inservice (see in-service): a hyphenated, compound adjective pertaining to training a group of professionals who are already in said profession: in-service training.


If you, as I am, are in said teaching profession, inservice (and its plural form: inservii) is (are) a noun…a thing...and a severe reality of education. Somewhere back in the 1980's, an administrator named Louie Livermore needed a kitschy word to call the first-of-year mandatory meetings concerning such nail-biting items as proper dress protocol for females (absolutely no more than three pairs of colored slouch socks), and drug enforcement (yes, Mrs. Stucky, that white ring on the boys' back pockets is formed from a chew can) as well as mandatory state assessment (such as the revolutionary do the work or fail theory). But Louie knew that teachers had begun to grumble about having far, far too many meetings, so he created inservice.

Administrators for the last 30 years have followed suit until inservice has become the catch-word for the mandatory yearly adjustment that must be performed on teachers who have been outofservice for over ten weeks on summer vacation, requiring them to return to school a minimum of three days ahead of students.

Unfortunately, Livermore, a star football center who failed sophomore English three times, went on to instruct at the college level, specializing in a pedagogical course called "Training Content Teachers." In this course, Livermore fell victim to another popular theory of the 1980's called euphamasia (a technique attributed to the Regan Administration in which a large word is given an odd ending which creates a new, non-existant word in order to confuse listeners.) To put it simply, Livermore, like most people involved in education at the highest levels, mistook CONTENT the noun for CONTENT the adjective. CONtent teachers deliver a specific classroom curriculum. ConTENT teachers do not drool in meetings.


What a horrible disappointment it has proven to be for graduate after graduate who have succomed to the Livermore pedagogical philosophy: Inservice creates content teachers. Alas, it seems that yet another set-back in the entire educational system could be solved with a simple grammar lesson.