Originally published in TEACH Magazine, April 2026 Issue
By Karen Wilfrid
Monday morning, I open the weekly calendar that our school secretary sends out, and I see this: 8AM – MANDATORY TRAINING FOR NEW PHONE SYSTEM.
I barely contain a squeal of delight.
I love meetings. As a teacher, I have the opportunity to attend many different types of meetings in a given week: faculty meetings, department meetings, cluster meetings, grade-level meetings, IEP meetings, 504 meetings, collaboration meetings, insubordination meetings. (Only that last one is made up.)
Whatever the meeting, I walk there with a sense of purpose. I carry my laptop, a pen just in case, and my thermos of tea. I feel like a Person Doing Her Job.
My experience with meetings began young. When I was growing up, my parents, both Protestant pastors, often returned to church for one evening obligation or another. Council meeting, budget meeting, stewardship meeting, preschool board meeting—not that my brother and I knew the difference. “Dad and I have meetings tonight” meant a frozen pizza dinner at five and, if we were lucky, the “nice” babysitter who brought with her all the supplies for making sock puppets. (The “mean” babysitter yelled at us for dancing around in our pajamas after lights-out.)
I thought everyone’s parents had meetings like this. As a matter of fact, my parents’ literal meeting—the first time they met—took place at an ecumenical gathering of pastors in the town of Plymouth. “It was at a meeting” was the beginning of their love story. I’ve never heard it told any other way.
Discovering my own love of meetings coincided, unsurprisingly, with my first employment, which was as a counselor at a summer arts camp. While the other counselors grumbled at our mandatory post-lunch sessions with the director, I eagerly arrived at the lounge and plopped down on a deflated couch. (My future husband one day plopped onto the same couch; maybe the romantic potential of meetings is something hereditary.)
I liked these meetings; we got information. We found out what was going on. And the best thing of all about these meetings: I didn’t have to run them. I wasn’t cajoling artsy teens to kick a ball, or managing the latest dorm crisis when a mouse ran across the common room floor. At a meeting, the heavy mantle of leadership was briefly lifted from my shoulders. Someone else was in charge.
I thought my appreciation for meetings might fade along with the glow of first-time employment, but, if anything, the opposite has been true. In my thirteen years as a middle school English teacher, I have come to love my meeting time even more fiercely.
“What do you do while we have electives?” a student will occasionally ask me when they realize that I continue to exist even when they are not in the room. When I say that I have a meeting, they usually squirm and respond, “Oh. Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I tell them. What could be more fun than geeking out with your fellow English teachers about punctuation? Or more gratifying than hammering out the details of an upcoming field trip? Or more thrilling than the battle to claim the best color (teal) for your team’s Field Day T-shirt?
Don’t get me wrong; some meetings are hard. Telling a parent that their child is struggling to make friends. Learning that a colleague’s position is being eliminated. Examining datasets which show that, despite your efforts, the same marginalized groups in your school continue to struggle. The content of meetings can be sobering; the camaraderie of them helps.
During the early months of the COVID shutdown, my English department colleagues and I met every Friday afternoon on Zoom. While my memories of teaching during that surreal time are (mercifully) dim, what I do remember is the comfort and normalcy of seeing my teacher friends in neat boxes on my screen as we collaborated on remote-friendly activities and created meticulously color-coded and hyperlinked Google Slides that, most likely, only three students actually looked at. We knew we were going overboard, but we did it anyway. Those meetings gave us purpose. They gave us each other.
For all that I enjoy the company of my colleagues, I can’t say that I am a saint, or even exemplary, at the meetings I attend these days. Sometimes, in the midst of a data presentation or school improvement plan, I’m thinking about the photocopies I have to make, or prepping internally for the phone call that awaits me next period. I’m only human, after all. But this is the beauty of the meeting: I can think about whatever I want.
I can be the person attentively taking notes, or the person who politely, discreetly, zones out. I can make eye contact with a colleague across the room in a meaningful glance that simply says: Yikes. I can decide if I want to add something when the person running the meeting asks, “Does anyone have something to add?”
In a day that is 95 percent active, in a meeting, I finally have the chance to be passive.
“Passive” these days usually comes as part of a negative phrase. “Passive aggressive.” “Passive learner.”
I was great at being a passive learner. I listened to everything I was taught, and I remembered it. What I hated were the classes where we had to apply things. I loved calculus, but I hated engineering; loved chemistry, hated labs. I would much rather do the math for a chemical equation than break out the beakers.
Meetings bring out my passive side, and I am totally okay with that.
Sometimes at a meeting, an administrator will have the great idea to get us moving around the room with an “ice breaker,” or have us read an article and then do a “turn and talk.” I do not like these meetings. I did not come to a meeting for a “turn and talk.” I came to a meeting for a “sit and listen.” When else in my day do I get to do that, and simply that?
A day as a teacher is filled with unpredictability, split-second decisions, and a go-go-go mentality that begins as soon as students set foot in the building. There is always more to do, and always pressure to do it better. It’s challenging, rewarding, and, at times, exhausting. In a day like that, a meeting is a brief respite—a fifty-five-minute oasis in which I am not the one responsible for everything.
So when I am at that phone training, even though it is very unlikely that I, a classroom teacher, will ever need to put someone on hold or patch in an outside call, I am content. I sit up front. I take notes. I am exactly where I’m supposed to be.
Karen Wilfrid is a writer and seventh-grade English teacher based in Newton, MA. When she’s not in a meeting, Karen enjoys walking in nature, playing with her cats, and teaching seventh graders the finer points of comma usage. She can be found online at www.karenwilfrid.com.
